Resident Evil, White Claudia
by FenrisUlf
Summary: Sherry Birkin receives a mysterious message: Your parent's legacy is being made manifest in the town of Silent Hill. Resident Evil Silent Hill crossover.
1. Salutations

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Part 1/7**

**By Fenris Ulf.**

Disclaimer: I do not own Resident Evil or Silent Hill. This includes, but is not limited to: zombies, Jack's Inn, Sherry Birkin, the T-virus, or spooky fogs.

It had begun as an odd little package in the mail. A plain brown wrapper delivered by the postman. She had opened the package and saw a little red leather book with "Diary" on the front written in gold letters. She opened the book and written on the first page was: "A true account of the final days of Raccoon City."

Slowly, hesitantly, she found a more comfortable place to sit and she began to read.

Some time later, she put the book down. Growing up, she had held the cherished memories of her parents as any child would remember. How she longed for a time when they would be finished with thier work and they would become a happy family again. Now she was fully aware of the horrible legacy her parents had left her. Her father, Dr. William Birkin had worked for the White Umbrella organization. White Umbrella was the bio-weapons division of the "legitimate" Umbrella pharmaceutical company. He had developed the terrible G-Virus, an improved version of the T-Virus that had turned Raccoon City into an infested city of the dead.

A city full of citizens turned into mindless, flesh-eating zombies. A city full of horrible monsters that killed and maimed without pity. Including her own mutated father, infected with his own G-Virus by his own hands.

She remembered being a child in that liche city, hiding in the police station until rescued by Claire Redfield.

She stood up and looked out the window of her tiny studio. Both her parents were killed in the destruction of Raccoon City. _As horrible as it was, it was probably for the best,_ she thought. Claire had dashed off to look for her brother Chris. Sherry and Leon Kennedy, Claire's cop friend, had been picked up by the Feds (though she never found out what organization they were a part of) for what seemed like months. Leon had eventually either escaped or had been allowed to leave.

Neither had taken Sherry with them or had made an attempt to do so. She had wished they had more than once, but she understood why they had done so.

She looked around at her studio. After graduating from college, she had set up a business. A consultant that specialized in identifying problems and solutions that companies and people just didn't want to see. She had a knack for making them see them. It sometimes surprised her how well it was doing. She wasn't really rich, but she was well off.

In spite of her parents many drawbacks, they had provided her with plenty of life insurance. Enough to get her through college and to start her business.

Enough so that she could shut off her life for a while, if she had to. She looked at the last page of the Diary. In a dark red ink, in a different hand from the rest of the pages, was a message: "Your parents' legacy is now made manifest in the town of Silent Hill." A legacy that included flesh-eating monsters and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

She pulled into the parking lot of Jack's Motel, a cheap rental in Silent Hill. It was a place that had probably looked cheap and worn when it was brand new. She took a good look around then reached into her jacket and felt the butt of the automatic pistol she had tucked into her shoulder holster. She didn't want to take a chance that this town was going to melt down like Raccoon City.

She trundled the luggage she had brought. Each one had some additional ordinance tucked away in secret compartments. Shotguns, ammo, assult rifles, even a sword. The thought "overkill" had briefly crossed her mind then was brutally squashed. When dealing with the T-Virus, there was no such thing as overkill.

"Hello," she said to the clerk behind the front desk. "My name is Cheryl Birkin. I have a reservation for today."

"Eh? Birkin?" He thumbed through a worn ledger. Sherry looked around. The window was open, letting her see out into the parking lot and street. There were hardly any people at all here. She frowned. Silent Hill used to be a thriving resort town, but in recent years, due to competition from other resorts and a general decline in the town itself, it wasn't as popular as it used to be. Still, it wasn't a dead town yet. She turned back to the clerk.

"Huh?" she cried out. He was no where to be found. "Hello?" she called out. She took a quick look around, her alarm bells ringing. No one here at all.

She was about to get the shotgun from her suitcase and take a look around when it hit her. A headache. A headache that started as an icepick stabbing behind her left eye and ballooned into a sledgehammer grinding her skull into dust. Everything went black.

"Ms. Birkin? Are you all right?" she heard.

"What?" she gasped out. She was standing up, leaning over the counter. She looked up and saw the concerned face of the clerk. "Was that a dream?" she muttered.

"Miss Birkin?"

She stood back up and shook her head. "I'm sorry, I guess I must have been more tired than I thought. What were you saying?"

"I said that I found your reservation. Here are your keys." He handed her a pair of metal keys. "Do you need any help with your bags?"

"No, thank you," she said. She took a look around the street visible through the window. There was a scattering of people there. Not very many, but there they were.

"Miss?" she heard. She looked at the clerk.

"Sorry, I'm fine now."

She settled in fairly quickly. She sat down at the desk to think. What happened to her? One moment she was talking to the clerk, then she was the last person on Earth, then she was back again. Was she sick, or was something else going on?

She stood up and got her gear.

First was a specially designed long coat. With it, she could stow her shotgun, plenty of ammo and the sword. She secured her other bags to make sure that they weren't searched. She then got out her special Personal Digital Assistant.

She didn't like to admit it, but there was a possibility that she might not make it. She would take notes with it and it would automatically upload back to the computer she had back at home. Hopefully, it wouldn't be trashed either, but there weren't a whole lot of options available to her.

She shrugged to herself. No sense in getting too worried. For all she knew, nothing might happen to her at all.

A light fog was rolling in from Toulca Lake. It gave the air a slight chill, which gave her the perfect excuse for wearing her coat. She pulled the edge of her long coat tighter.

"Gah!" she said, going to one knee as the headache swelled. _Is there something wrong with me? _she thought as the pain swelled to a thudding crescendo. Just as she thought she would black out again, the pain stopped.

She shook her head, the pain stopped as suddenly as it began. She looked around. It was too quiet. She opened her long coat. There was a tailored slit that let her access most of her weapons, but still...

She shook her head again. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end with the feeling of added danger coming in off the wind. The feeling that something could come out and get her at any moment. Most people would scoff at such a feeling, but she knew better. There were such things as monsters. She reached inside her coat slit and felt the reassuring bulk of the shotgun stock.

She firmed her mouth. Bad feeling or not, she was here to do a job. It was time to see it through. Her first stop was the local Toulca Lab, a research lab run by Umbrella.

She hadn't gone more than a few blocks when the feeling of danger had gone up, not down. The town was far too quiet. Not a person, or a dog, or a bird. No planes flying overhead, no cars running past. She took a quick look around. She took out her shotgun. If she was wrong, then the next thing she would hear would be sirens. She looked carefully at the shop window. The interior was dark.

She turned quickly as she heard the growling of a dog. She craned her neck as she tried to pinpoint where it was coming from. She held out the shotgun as she cautiously moved foward. It sounded like it was coming from the next street over.

"Ah!" she cried out. Her head felt like it was going to explode.

_No, not trying to explode, _said some distant, clear corner of her mind. _Like something is trying to come in. _

Then she blacked out.

She awoke slowly. "Where am I?"

"You're in the Silent Hill Police Station, Miss Birkin."

She sat up and took a look around. She was in a tiny jail cell. She looked down and noticed that she was wearing her regular clothes sans her weapons and other items.

"We were worried about you," continued the young police officer. "So the Sergeant went to get Dr. Morris."

"And why wasn't I taken to the hospital if you were so worried?" she asked him.

"I don't know. To be honest, that's what I was thinking, but when Sergeant Burton insisted, I went along with it."

The outer door opened and two people entered. One was a young woman in a police uniform. The other was an older man wearing a suit and carrying an old fashioned doctor's bag.

"Hey Sergeant Burton. She's awake."

"Dr. Morris," Sgt. Burton said, "please take a look at Ms. Birkin."

"All right."

"Let him into the cell," she ordered. "When he's done, and if he pronounces her fit, I want to talk to the prisioner alone."

She sat in the interrogation room for a while. Like most of the station facilities, it was small and worn but clean and servicable. She had not been cuffed. When the doctor had told the Sergeant that she appeared to be in good health and did not appear to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Burton had waved off his disclaimer that a blood test was needed to be sure and the first officer had escorted her into this room.

The steel door opened with a slight squeal and Sgt. Burton entered the room with a rather thick folder.

"Your name is Cheryl Birkin," she began without greeting or warning. "The only child of doctors William and Annette Birkin. You are also one of the few survivors of the Raccoon City incident. Raised in various foster homes until you petitioned for emancipation after gratuating high school at sixteen. You gratuated from college in an accelerated three-years and promptly settled in Chicago where you set up a trouble-shooting consulting practice.

"Today, you checked into Jack's Motel and was later found downtown, unconscious, holding a 10-gage shotgun. A search of your person revealed a Baretta 9mm handgun, enough ammunition for a war and a sword, of all things. Ms. Birkin, what did you intend to do with all that hardware?"

Sherry looked at the serious woman across from her. There were a few ways she could play this, but the fact she hadn't been immediately sent to a hospital in a strait-jacket made her cautiously optomistic.

"Before I answer that Sargeant, I need to know if you know what really happened at Raccoon City."

Before she could answer Sherry's question, there was a knock at the door, which was then promptly thrown open.

"Sarge, the mayor's on the horn. He said he wants to talk to you right away and he sounds plenty pissed."

Burton gave the young man a dark and dirty look. "Ms. Birkin, I'll be right back."

She left the room.

It was a few seconds after that that the headache hit Sherry. This was different from the other ones in that it felt like an icepick behind her left eye and it stayed at that level. The room faded and grew dim until everything was dark. She had the momentary impression of seeing someone across from her when the room slowly came back into focus.

"What on Earth...?" she murmured as she took a look around the room. The first thing was that the modern fluorescent lamp had been replaced with an old cheap overhead that barely cast enough light to show the table underneath it. The table itself looked old and weathered with nameless stains spread over its surface. The walls were stripped of its paint in uneven blotches with grafitti scrawled over its surface.

She looked to her left and was surprised to see that the heavy door was no longer there.

She stared at the gaping egress for a few moments before giving her arm a pinch. Either she was dreaming or she was in ten times as much trouble as she was in Raccoon.

Only one thing to do. She calmly walked out the door. "Hello?" she called out. "Sargeant Burton? Dr. Morris?"

No one answered her call, and exploring the station provided less clues, not more. With the exception of a lack of dust, the whole station looked as though no one had inhabited it for years.

She opened a door marked 'Evidence Room' and saw something a bit odd. It was her long coat mounted on a dressmaker's dummy. Her sword, a Japanese katana of recent vintage, was propped up against the wall. Her coat, sword and the dressmaker's dummy all looked like they were in pristine condition.

Practicality won out over amazement and she did a quick search of her coat. She found her PDA and shoulder harness, but her firearms and ammo were nowhere to be found. She shrugged herself into the coat and strapped the sheath of the sword into the coat. She then drew the blade.

She turned on her PDA. It appeared to be working fine, but it couldn't get a connection to her home computer. She looked around at the decrepit station and didn't feel the least bit surprised.

A further search refused to yield her other weapons or anything the police might have carried. She also tried to look at the hardcopy police files, but the filing cabinet was filled with noisome flakes instead of paper.

She looked at the front door of the station. No zombies, Lickers, Tyrants or other monsters: good. Also, no people, no cars and no phone: bad. There was no way around it, she wasn't going to find out what was going on in the station.

With sword in hand, she cautiously opened the door and looked outside. There was a heavy fog over everything. She couldn't see more than a dozen feet in front of her. She stepped out and cautiously looked around. Her game plan was simple now. Get as far away from Silent Hill as possible.

The most obvious thing to do was to get a car started. As she made her way to one of the cars parked across the street she heard a scream. She looked around. It was hard to tell but she thought it came from up the street. She began to jog towards the sound.

She was close enough to hear someone yelling: "Go away!" She turned the corner and froze at the sight that greeted her.

It was a zombie. Not just any zombie either. The monstrosity of rotting flesh was easily seven feet tall, dwarfing her own sixty-four inch height. It was closing in on a cowering man on the ground.

She steeled herself against the sight and silently charged in. There was no way she would be able to get a lethal blow in to the head, so she had to cut him down to size. It turned as her footfalls echoed on the pavement. It was slow and the blade easily sliced through the withered leg. It gracelessly fell back and hit the ground with a thud. Sherry quickly reversed the sword and thrust the point into the middle of its broad forehead.

She removed the katana from the corpse and stepped back. She then sat down on the ground and realized how hard she was breathing. She had taken Kendo classes to learn how to use the sword. She had visited the firing range to learn how to use a gun.

She had thought that Raccoon City had prepared her, but nothing could really prepare her.

"Miss? Are you okay?" she heard.

She looked up to see the man looming over her with a concerned look on his face.

"I'm fine," she said. She got up, wiped the sword clean then turned to look at the man she rescued. He was an older man wearing a white long-sleeve shirt and black slacks. "I'm Sherry Birkin," she said to him.

"Don Hamilton," he said, holding out his hand. "Thanks for the save. I was walking home when this creepy fog just moved in from the lake. Before I knew it that thing was moving at me."

She was about to reply when a stabbing headache blindsided her. _This is getting old, _she thought quickly before her world greyed out.

She found herself kneeling on the ground. It was pitch black. She could feel the metal grating under her hand.

Her attention was then taken up by the wild animal cry she heard nearby. It was the familiar wail of the mutant creature that had haunted her dreams and nightmares for years.

"Father," she said before another wave of pain flooded her brain.

She came to. She was kneeling on the ground, the fog swirling around her. She looked around her. It appeared to be the same place she was in before.

The main difference was that the corpse of the giant zombie was missing, as was Don. "Mr. Hamilton?" she called out.

There was a dark spot in the concrete road where the zombie had been. It was high time to leave and get reinforcements. She was about to break into one of the cars when she heard the once familiar moan of the wounded and dying.

It lurched from a nearby alleyway. It was once again taller than it should have been. She paused in the midst of smashing the glass of the car. The viral zombies were slow, but strong. If it got to her before she got the car started, it was possible that it might be able to get her. Also, it was too risky to engage it while armed with just a sword. She backed away and sprinted as it began shuffling towards her.

After about a block, she seemed to have lost the monster. She paused for a moment while looking around her. She was in the downtown area and had ended up near a gas station. Perhaps she could get a map of the town or maybe even get a working car that she could steal without being hassled by another monster.

"Maybe I could wish for the shotgun they keep beneath the counter, while I'm at it," she muttered to herself. There was no harm in looking at least. Probably.

She cautiously entered the station. The garage area didn't have a single car inside. The attendant area was a bit more fruitful. On the counter was a map of the town. It was a fairly complete map with fold up sections highlighting the popular lake area as well as the amusement park.

Someone had taken a red pencil and had highlighted three locations on the map. She quickly memorized the closest way out of town then tucked the map into her coat. If she survivied, perhaps she could come back to check those places.

Then again, she should have her head examined again for thinking about coming here again.

The nearest exit point was the Interstate highway. All she had to do was follow Bachman Road until it met up with the highway overpass. So far the journey had been easy. No giant zombies so far. The swirling fog made it hard to see very far. Occasionally, the odd sound would make her tread cautiously, but nothing attacked her out of the fog.

When she first saw it, she didn't understand what it was. She had simply attributed it to the way the fog masked distances and obscured detail. She then gaped in open amazement as she neared it. What it was was a gaping chasm that was where Bachman Road was supposed to intersect the interstate. She stood as close to the edge as she dared.

"This can't be happening," she said out loud as she tried to stare across the void to whatever was on the other side. She tossed a loose piece of tarmac into the depths as she debated about climbing down the side. She heard nary a sound from that stone.

She shook her head. It was time to accept what was going on. She was stuck in a town where something stranger than the T-virus was afoot. Her first attempt to escape was a complete bust. She stood up. The first thing she needed to do was to get some serious armaments. Preferably a fully automatic machine gun, but she would settle for her Baretta back. Next was to test each exit from town. One of them might not be blocked by an impossible geographical disaster.

Then there were the marks on the map. She took out the map. The next available exit was off of Barker Ave. One of the red marks was on the way. She didn't think that it would shed any light on what was going on, but it might be useful.

She stared at the structure in dumbfounded amazement. Right there in front of her was the Toulca Labs, the place that she wanted to see in the first place. She looked down at the map in her hand. How was it possible that a map found on some gas station counter would have one of the places she had originally wanted to see?

She looked behind her and was tempted to try and hotwire a fourth car. There was a lack of viral zombies on the way over, so she had tried to hotwire a car. Hotwire three cars. Failed to hotwire three cars. She wasn't sure that she would succeed, but she was unable to get the engine to turn over. She wasn't even sure that the batteries in the cars had any power in them. In the end, she decided that unless she got a hold of a manuel that said, "How to hotwire a car," she was going to give up.

She was about to walk up to the building when she heard the low, feral growl of a dog. She drew her sword and began to slowly make her way to the building.

She was almost to the door when it emerged from the fog. Half of it were like the dogs of Raccoon City. Muscular with dark fur that seemed to be permanently covered with a dark ichor. The other half was completely skinless, with the muscles and bone showing quite plainly.

Instead of immediately attacking her, it lifted its muzzle and began to howl. It was immediately accompanied by several other howls, some near, some far.

That was a big enough clue for Sherry. She sprinted the last few feet to the door while the first ghoul dog began chasing her. She reached the door and almost cried in joy as the latch smoothly opened for her. She entered the darkened room and pushed the door shut behind her. First she heard the click of the lock, then a muffled thud against the door.

It didn't repeat.

The room was very dark. The only source of light was what looked like a nightlight about twelve feet away. She cautiously walked toward it. It was one of those emergency flashlights, the ones that went on when the power went out. She pried it out and turned it on. The first thing she did was to try and turn on the lights. Nothing happened when she flipped the light switches, but that didn't surprise her in the least.

The next thing she did was to tuck the flashlight into her front pocket so she could have her hands free. She had wanted to search Toulca Labs and here she was. Most of the offices on the ground floor seemed to be dedicated to a sales unit, as did the second floor according to a small map of the building. The "lab" part of Toulca Labs seemed to occupy three rooms on the second floor consisting of a "cultivation room," whatever that meant, an actual laboratory and an office.

She cautiously made her way to the second floor. The building seemed to be a bit rundown, but in good condition overall. The office was at the very end of the hall flanked by the lab and cultivation room. She stopped by that last one. "What on earth is a cultivation room?" she asked out loud, looking at the innoculous plate on the door. She turned the knob on the door and entered the room.

It seemed to be some sort of greenhouse. The roof and outer walls were made of thick, glass tiles and let her dimly see outside. Most of the space was taken up with beds of dead, withered plants. That's not what surprised Sherry. What surprised her was that in the middle of the plants was the upper half of a mannequin. The mannequin was clothed in a pink, denim vest and was holding a crossbow in one of its hands.

Sherry stared at the vest in dumbfounded amazement. It was more perplexing and unreal feeling than anything else that had happened to her since she had arrived in this creepy town. She took a look at the back of the dummy. Sure enough, the familiar angel holding a bomb was there, as were the words: "Made in Heaven."

When Claire Redfield had helped her escape from Raccoon City, she had given her this exact same vest. She remembered feeling braver and stronger when Claire had given it to her. She had lost the vest in one of the foster homes she had been in. She touched the vest, remembering one of the few shining lights in her unhappy childhood.

She smiled wryly as she put her hand down. Few people could understand how a simple vest given to her while trying to survive the monsters in Raccoon City would be so uplifting.

She turned her attention to the crossbow. She wasn't really familiar with this type of weapon, but she would take any sort of distance weapon at this point. A quick search of the greenhouse turned up two items of interest. One was a quiver that held thirty crossbow bolts. It was a bit like an extra long ammo pack that was belted around the waist.

The other was a manilla folder. On the front, in bold print, was: Project White Claudia.

That looked promising. Sherry pulled up a chair and began to read it.

"The White Claudia is a plant that grows only in the region of the town of Silent Hill," the report began.

**A locally produced narcotic, PTV, is derived from this plant. This drug appears to have psychotropic and hallucinogenic properties. Of specific interest to White Umbrella are certain other effects of note. When test subjects were exposed to the drug, they began to effect thermal and electromagnetic changes in thier environment while in the midst of hallucinogenic episodes. These changes were very slight and only noticed due to the sensitive nature of the equipment used. It is theorized that the drug is enhancing the psionic abilities of the individual as a side effect. **

Sherry paused for a moment as she reached the end of the page. Why didn't they simply ship a few samples of the plant to a regular Umbrella facility?

**Certain parties have expressed concern over the cost of building a new facility over simply transporting a few viable samples to a regular White Umbrella test facility. The main reason for this approach is that all samples that have been transported perish when they are taken out of the Silent Hill area. There are even unconfirmed reports that the PTV becomes inert outside the vicinity of the town as well. **

Sherry frowned. It looked like the last page was missing from the report. The page that had the name of the person who wrote the report. A date stamp on the folder indicated that the report was a few years old.

She rolled the document up and stuffed it into a coat pocket as best she could.

The next thing to check out was the lab. She slung the crossbow across her back and drew her sword. Not her first choice for the narrow corridor, but better than the unfamiliar crossbow.

The lab was surprisingly clean and neat. There was even a live potted plant. Sherry looked at that last for a surprised moment. A potted plant in a lab does better than plants in a greenhouse. Sherry supposed that this was a semi-decent lab for botany and pharmasuitical company. There were a few innocuous documents. Logs, records, experiments, but nothing that looked interesting.

Next stop, the office. She paused as she approached the door. She hadn't noticed in the dark corridor, but the name plate on the door had been ripped off. She gripped the katana and tried the door. It slowly opened up.

She almost lost her lunch. The room was covered in blood, body parts and miscellanious bits of flesh and other, less identifiable, pieces. Directly across from the door was a computer monitor. On its screen was a red symbol of some sort.

Now that the door was open, the familiar and unwanted scent of rotting flesh was washing over her. Putting a sleeve over her nostrils and hoping that none of the dismembered corpses rose up, she gingerly stepped into the room. As she got closer, the symbol became more clear, but it didn't look like any symbol she had ever seen before. It looked like two concentric circles with three smaller circles around the center. Strange writing was around the border while strange symbols were sharing space with the smaller circles. The whole thing was in red.

Then she heard a beep coming from her PDA. As she reached into her pocket for it, she noticed the symbol on the screen melting away, pixel by pixel, rather quickly. She got out her PDA and saw the symbol being reconstructed on the screen.

After a few moments, the computer was blank and her PDA had the red symbol on it. She looked at the computer monitor with some suspicion, then she gingerly prodded a few gore covered keys with the tip of her sword. She then dragged out the monitor cable. As she thought, it wasn't even plugged in.

"Of course its not plugged in," she muttered as she left, trying not to gag. She tried to wipe the blood from her shoes, sword and anything else she thought had blood on it.

She then looked at her PDA. The odd symbol showed up as an icon on her main menu. When she tapped it, all that appeared was the symbol. It took up space and it seemed to be real, but it didn't seem to do anything. She shrugged. It might be important later.

Just as she turned around to leave the room, a familar headache overcame her. She grunted with the pain and clutched her head.

The pain swelled and receded, but it didn't get bad enough for her to loose consciousness. That was when she heard it. It sounded like the ordinary bustle of an office building. The gore slowly vanished from the room. Athough it was still dark, she could see two men in the room.

"We haven't heard anything for several weeks," the man seated at the desk said. He sounded faint, as if he was talking from the bottom of a well.

"We haven't either. Don't worry about your job or anything like that. Contact me if you learn anything, even if it seems trivial to you."

"Hey, can you see me?" Sherry asked them, even as they faded away.

She was once more in the gore-encrusted office room. "Was that a memory, a hallucination, or something else?" she asked herself. She looked at her PDA. The crimson symbol still filled up the face of the little computer.

"I'm not in Silent Hill anymore. I'm someplace else."

She walked out of the office and thought about it some more. "Am I in Hell?"

That seemed to be possible.

"If there's a way in, there must be a way out." She looked at the symbol again. "And you seem to be the key."

She looked at the map again. Trying to get out of Silent Hill through the logical and reasonable ways weren't working. It was time to try something unreasonable. The next closest circle was on the Midwich Elementary School.

"If I find more symbols, I might be able to find a way out of here."

It was not totally logical or reasonable, but it gave her hope. She knew, better than most people, that hope was something powerful that could not be denied.

To be continued...

Part 2 - Remorse


	2. Remorse

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Part 2/7**

**By Fenris Ulf**

Disclaimer: I do not own Resident Evil (Capcom does) or Silent Hill (Konami does) which is a good thing as it means that I can write this without biting, screaming, kicking, and other forms of violence.

Sherry looked out over the lawn of the Toulca Labs. A pack of ghoul dogs were still keeping watch over the front door. She left the building by the simple expedient of the back door. She hefted the crossbow as she entered the alley behind the building. She had taken a few test shots in the safety of the building, but she was under no illusions. In time, the building would be compromised. Also, she was a mediocre shot. She wasn't eager to square off against anything really nasty like a Licker.

Just then, she heard the unnaturally deep moan of the giant zombies. She raised the crossbow. This was the perfect time to see if this thing was effective against the creatures of this unholy town. She used the alley for cover as she aimed the primitive weapon. Then she saw two of them, lumbering out of the fog. She slowly let out her breath as she aimed and pulled the trigger, hoping that most of what she learned at the firing range held here.

The bolt hit the creature in the head. Not dead center, but that didn't matter to Sherry as much as the sight of the zombie stopping in its tracks and collapsing onto the street. No time to celebrate, she put her foot in the stirrup and recocked the arms of the crossbow.

She backed up a few feet before dropping another bolt into the groove. She aimed and fired again. Still not dead center, but close enough.

As it fell, she realized that she had been holding her breath after firing at the second creature. She gasped for air, then promptly coughed as she inhaled the foetid odor of the rotting monsters. In spite of the grim surroundings, she alternated between laughing and coughing as she felt as if she might live through Silent Hill as she did Raccoon City.

She slowly tried to sneak up on the lone dog-like figure she made out dimly through the fog. The number of actual monsters remained low, but there were now a number of ghoul dogs on the street. She wasn't eager to meet up with them. The few zombies she met went down easily enough with a single crossbow bolt to the forehead. After getting in her target practice, she figured that it would be better to conserve her shots. There was no way she was going to try and recycle the bolts.

The next mark on the map was on the Midwich Elementary School. It was in the residential disctrict, also called Old Silent Hill. She had tried going the direct route, but a whole pack of ghoul dogs was blocking that route. Same with most of the others.

This was the most promising with only one that she could see. She was lucky that she was able to back away from the others.

She slowly drew her sword, hoping that the creature didn't hear it.

It didn't seem to notice so she executed her plan to kill the sonofabitch. She aimed her crossbow. When she was sure, she fired a shot off.

It hit! The bolt firmly lodged itself into the animal's flank. It gave out a startled yelp before orienting itself at her. It ran with a clumsy, lopsided gait that was a lot faster than it looked. She barely had time to drop the crossbow and grab her sword. She aimed the point at the dog and prayed that she was right about these things.

When it was almost on top of her, it jumped straight for her throat, giving her a fraction of a second to let it skewer itself on the katana then wrenching herself and the blade from the path of its body.

She looked down at her handiwork. It was still alive, writhing and growling at her, but it was severely wounded. She finished it off with a stab into its brain.

She paused for a moment to give her racing heart time to slow down. Hopefully, she wouldn't get too much practice at this.

She was opening her map to reorient herself when she saw it. The fog shifted and she almost dropped it. A seven-foot tall zombie shambled towards her and was only worth a quick dispatch compared to this impossibility.

A neat white house with blue trim. It was two-stories tall. At first glance, it didn't seem different than most of the Silent Hill houses that flanked it. The first odd sign was that half of a car that was parked in front of the house was gone. A circle of cracks surrounded the house that Sherry had to carefully step across. The clincher came when she was close enought to read the mailbox.

"Birkin" it proclaimed.

She stared at the mailbox for a goodly while. It had to be a coincidence. There had to be tons of Birkins scattered around. There was no way that this could be her house from Raccoon City.

Especially since her house had probably been totally wiped out when Raccoon City had been nuked.

The smart thing to do would be to bypass the house. She looked at the circle of cracks around the place. Whether it was her old house or not, something strange was going on.

She sighed and dropped a bolt into the crossbow.

"The universe is just out to get me today," she said.

She walked up to the porch, ready for anything.

The automatic porch light came on as she approached, surprising her. For some reason, her house had power. She turned the knob for the door and it surprised her again by opening easily.

She turned on the living room light as she entered and saw it. It looked like a nurse. It was the right size and shape. It looked like an ordinary woman wearing a whte nurse's uniform. The only flaw was its face. It looked like a combination of a raw red scab and melted wax, as if the red ruins of someone's face had scabbed over then was melted under intense heat. The most disturbing feature was the single eye located on the left side of the face, about halfway down. It was tilted at a ninety-degree angle.

It was holding a scalpel in its right hand. It seemed to be incapable of moving its knees as it skittered past the sofa. Wishing she had a gun for the umpteenth time, she slashed at it with her blade after putting her crossbow aside. She raised an eyebrow in surprise as it lurched backward to get out of the way of the sword. Sherry quickly stepped away to keep the table between her and the nurse. The nurse danced back and forth as Sherry drew the crossbow, cocked it and fired the bolt at the nurse.

The bolt slammed into the nurse and it went down. Sherry frowned as it slowly got back up. That had been a clean head shot. The business end of the bolt was sticking out of the back of its head. Sherry aimed a bit lower and shot again. It went down, then came back up.

New tactics. Sherry shot it again, but this time, she immediately dashed over and decapitated it before it could get up.

She held her sword ready in case it got up again but that seemed to do the trick. She frowned as she took another look at the nurse. Most of the monsters she had run into so far were from Raccoon City, or slight variations of them. She was thankful that she hadn't run into any Hunters or, god forbid, a Tyrant.

Nothing like this nurse was in Raccoon City. She frowned again. What could this mean? Only one thing to do. She stood up and loaded her crossbow. Time to clean house and find some answers.

That was easier said than done. The scab nurses liked to hide under beds, in closets and in the blind spots in a room. More than once, they got the drop on her only to be repelled by a well placed crossbow bolt.

Her house wasn't all that large, but she had used up all but two of her bolts in this cleanup process. She was debating the merits of recycling the bolts when she opened the door to her own bedroom.

She cautiously opened the door. The hallway light spilled into the room to reveal a figure. It was tall and slender wearing a lab coat. It had short, blond hair and was holding something in its hand.

"Mother?" Sherry blurted out. She dashed into the room and turned the light on.

It took a moment for her brain to catch up with her. Her mother had been killed in Raccoon City. She had watched Dr. Annette Birkin die. The figure was a wax image, but there was no doubt that it was supposed to be her mother. The figure's face was drawn up in a rictus of fury. In her right hand was a Baretta nine-millimeter pistol.

The smart thing to do would be to simply get the gun, search the figure and move on. Instead, Sherry sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Hey, Mom," she said to the still figure. "Its been a long time, hasn't it?" She looked again into the face full of daemonic fury and hate. She wondered if this was the image of her mother that Claire Redfield saw the most. "A lot has happened since I saw you last. You and Dad. You missed my braces being put in and taken out. You missed my first kiss. Getting my drivers license. You missed my eighth birthday, but then again, you were alive when that happened."

Sherry sighed as she thought about the life she might have had.

"I have a confession to make. While I was running around with Claire, I kept thinking how great it would be if I had a big sister like her, or maybe even a mom. She resuced me from that police station and spent most of her time making sure I was okay. I tried to help her out, but now I realize that I must have been driving her crazy running around on my own like that.

"Did you know about Chief Irons? I found out a lot from this diary. Did you know that he was a serial killer? You probably asked him to watch me, didn't you. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I thought I had gotten over your death a long time ago, but I've never been able to talk to you like I am now.

"There's a memorial to Raccoon City now. I was able to go to the ceremony when they unveiled it to the public. Of course, it wasn't held anywhere near Raccoon City. Umbrella is still cleaning up the mess, worried about what might resurface."

Sherry paused and looked straight into the face of the statue again. "There were a hundred-thousand people that died in Raccoon City. You, Dad, probably everyone you worked with, my friend Lisa Yeats, her family, my teacher, Mr. Markowitz, Mrs. Harrison who would watch me whenever you and dad were working. I didn't know that she wasn't related to me until I was ten."

She wiped at her cheek and looked at the tear. Tears, but no sobs.

"It's time again, Mom. Time for me to be a good little soldier. I don't know why you're here, but I have to go on. Good bye."

She stood up and looked at the statue for a moment. She then decided to get down to business. She examined the hand with the gun in it. The fingers were somehow cast around the grip. She grimaced, then snapped a few of the fingers until the gun came loose. It was a fully functional Baretta, complete with a full clip of bullets. A quick search of the pockets on the statue revealed two more clips and a vial of purple liquid.

This gave her pause. Althought she had never actually seen one, it reminded her of the vials of G-virus described in the journal. The idea that a whole vial of G-virus was just lying around in this manner made her distinctly nervous. She decided to leave it. No telling what might happen to it in this crazy town.

She searched the now cleared corners of the house for anything useful. Nothing real useful came up. She sighed, then decided to continue onward.

There, something gave her pause. In the middle of the hallway was a very large hole. The house had a basement. As a child, she had been afraid to go down it. Matters did not improve as an adult, especially when a scab nurse had come after her from behind the furnance. This hole was not a part of that basement.

She peered down the hole. There was a room down there. Sitting in a pool of light was a boy, perhaps ten years old. The floor did not look all that far down.

She jumped down. The boy was sitting in the middle of some symbol. The only thing she recognized was the pyramid with the eye in it. The boy was sitting with his knees drawn up. His arms were wrapped around his legs and he was gently rocking back and forth.

He was thin and dirty. His straight, brown hair hung limply over his pinched face. He was wearing the remains of a green and white stripped t-shirt with green shorts. He didn't look up as Sherry approached.

"Hi," she said to him. "My name's Sherry."

He didn't respond.

"Uh, Sherry Birkin," she said to him, non-plussed by his lack of response.

At that, he turned his head to look at her.

"Ah. So this little house is your handi-work," he croaked out. His eyes narrowed. "How did you get down here? How did you even find me?"

"It wasn't easy," Sherry said. "There were all these zombie nurses and I had to kill them all..."

"You killed them all!" he yelled out, standing up. "You bitch, they were protecting me. Who sent you? I'll bet it was Lobsel Vith. Yes, you have his stench all over you. I'll get you for that."

With that, he stepped out of the circle.

He was a skinny ten year old kid, but something about him made Sherry draw her gun.

"I was protected in the Seal of Metraton," he hissed.

It seemed that a shadow came over him. A shadow eight-feet tall. It appeared to be a humanoid form that bulked huge.

Sherry immediately knew what it was. "No," she whispered. The form of the little boy faded away while the monstrous shadow solidified. As it became clearer, it resolved into a huge, man-like figure wearing a long coat. The lttle skin visible was a grey color and its eyes were like black pits.

"Mr. X," she whispered. The Tyrant that had stalked her for the G-virus she had unwittingly carried for her mother. She resisted the urge to fire at the monstrous creature, nothing less than a grenade or rocket launcher would do any real damage. She backed away to the side hoping to find some way to get away from it.

She braced for its attack. Its cold eyes looked at her for a moment, then it looked up, away from her. It walked away from her while she almost collapsed in relief.

Why didn't that crazy kid/monster go after her?

She thought about that for a moment. The kid might have wanted to kill her, but the original Mr. X was after the G-virus she carried. She looked up to where she had left that strange purple vial.

"I wonder what he would have done after he got the virus?" she mused to herself. She wasn't all that eager to find out what this copy would do. Behind the Circle was an opening to a corridor.

The corridor was dark, but a lightswitch changed all that. It was twenty feet in length. At the end was a little platform. On one side was a little roller coaster sitting on a stretch of tracks.

She decided to take a moment to pause for a little something.

"Come on now," she said out loud. "Is there some logical reason why someone would put a rollar coaster here? Is someone trying to tell me something?" She waited for a moment for something, anything to respond.

When the universe failed to respond, she let out a long suffering sigh and got into the car. On the right side of the front seat was a flashing red button. With a great deal of trepidation, she pressed the button.

There was the steady sound of the drive chain clinking as the car moved steadily foward. Though the tracks neither went up or down, the little car moved faster and faster, shooting forth into the darkness.

After either an eternity or a moment of travel time, she saw a tiny bit of light. The car slowed down, finally stopping at a little platform. Sherry slowly got out of the car, looking at the platform. The floor was made of a metal grate, reinforced here and there with iron beams. The opposite wall was made of rough cinder blocks, liberally covered in grafitti and nameless stains. On the other hand, the door looked clean, sleek and modern, like some of the doors in the Umbrella facility that Claire took her through.

She pulled out her handgun and moved toward the door. It smoothly slid open at her approach, showing a set of stairs going up. As she went through, they slid shut. She was not able to open them again, but she was resigned that no place in this crazy town was safe.

She went up the stairs, the light from her flashlight lighting the way. The decor was the same as the platform, all metal grating and bloodstained concrete.

She cautiously opened the door at the top. She found herself in a small room with a large pit in the center. There was a door to her right and a double door across from her. She cautiously made her way to the other side. The doors opened smoothly as she pushed them open.

She sighed again as she shined her flashlight over the dark hallway. The decor was the same as the platform. The metal, blood-colored grating covering everything with nameless bits of gore offering its own color.

"If it gets any more grim, I'm going to have to do something silly," she said. She squinted as a bright light shined from the opposite door.

"I'm going to hope that that's another normal person trapped here," she said as she held up the handgun. "I'm going to hope," she chanted again, as she crept closer to the window to get a good look outside the door. "Ah, who am I kidding. I just hope that its something that I can kill with regular bullets." She squatted near the window, then slowly stood up to look over the tiny window.

The eight-foot tall Tyrant she had known as Mr. X was standing in the middle of a courtyard of some sort. He was looking up at the sky. At his feet was a flare of some sort which had given off the light.

"Crap, I didn't dodge him." She began to quietly back away from the door. If she was lucky, there might be some way to go around him and get away while he was doing... whatever he was doing. She paused for a moment while a bit of curiosity came over her. What was he doing there?

She was passing a counter-top when a glint from her flashlight caught her eye. "What's this?" She gingerly picked it up. It was a plastic bag of the sort hospitals used for intravenous tubes. On the front was a label: "PTV in saline solution. Potassium supplement."

"Wait, PTV?" She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the White Claudia file. Sure enough, it was the same drug mentioned in the report. She took a look at the bag again. It was possible that it was just a regular bag for transporting the drug, but it was perfectly in character for Umbrella to be testing it on some hapless guinea pigs.

There was a small corridor set into the wall that led into a small room. This was a bit more disturbing. The room held a number of small cages made out of solid iron bars. Set on the outside of these cages was a small bar with a hook. On one of the hooks was another empty bag of PTV. The cages themselves were disturbing in the detail that the door on the front showed signs of being stressed and beaten from the inside until the more fragile lock was snapped. A more thourough search of the room revealed a few holes in the walls, floors and ceiling of the metal grating.

Sherry shook her head. It was amazing how she was beginning to wish for some good, reliable zombies to show up.

She opened the double door to her left. She found herself in a fairly wide corridor. In front of her was a door with a shiney metal plate saying, "Secondary processing plant."

She opened the door and was surprised to see a long, narrow room. Mounted on top of the metal grating was a platform of white tiles. On top of the platform was a very modern and clean looking laboratory. With the exception of a bit of a mess and a few blood splatters, it was actually a very nice place. She cautiously mounted the platform. She flipped a few of the switches for the lamps and lights, but nothing came on.

She found a stack of labels, each saying "PTV" on it as well as a few empty plastic pouches. At the other end of the counter was a stack of plastic bags filled with a yellowish powder. The bags were stacked in a bin marked: "PTV."

A further search turned up a filing cabinet. The first thing she found was some sort of company memo.

**To all new Umbrella employees to the Midwich facility,**

**Welcome on behalf of the White Umbrella research team. Remember that there are a few safety and security precautions that must be taken while you are here. **

**The area outside of the facility is inhabited by a number of strange creatures. The area is not normally accessible, but it is also not secured. While security personelle are on hand to deal with any problems, they cannnot be everywhere at once. **

**Check out a side arm at the armory and qualify if you need to. Also be sure to carry a radio with you at all times.**

**Due to the limited access with the outside world, you will be required to live on site most of the time you are here. Do not attempt to explore the environment here if you are able to leave the facility, as this is extremely unsafe. Every effort to make your stay as comfortable as possible has been done.**

**Remember that in the case of an evacuation order, report to the central courtyard as indicated on the attached map, as this is the only exit point to the real world. **

Sherry looked at that last statement for a goodly while. "The place where Mr. X is camped out," she said. She looked at the attached map. Sure enough, the courtyard she saw had the red "EVAC" in the middle.

On the plus side, the place had an armory listed. There might be something in there hefty enough to take out the Tyrant. If possible, a rocket launcher she could fire from the roof.

The rest of the contents of the lab seemed downright uninteresting compared to this bit of news.

As she left the lab, she heard a peculiar sound. It sounded a bit like a hiss combined with the sound of someone retching. She shined her flashlight along the path of her pistol sight to try and zero in on the monster.

She saw it almost immediatly. It had the facial features of a baby, if the baby was the size of a normal man. Sherry was frozen at the sight of the grotesque creature as it dragged itself closer to her. Its chubby arms terminated in fingers that held hooked, talon-like claws. The torso was cut off just below where the ribs were with dark strings trailing the creature. A long, green tube grew out of its mouth like an obscene tongue. A few wisps of hair grew from the top of the head. The eyes were completely black.

She grimaced as she felt the bile on her tongue and she shot the creature. It squealed as the bullet hit its brain. A stream of green liquid flew from its tongue before it flopped on the floor. The stream splattered on the ground just inches from Sherry's feet. It didn't dissolve the metal, but the acrid smell convinced her that letting it touch her would be a very bad idea.

She tucked her flashlight back in the pocket and drew her sword. She gingerly prodded the creature to make sure it was dead.

She wondered if this was one of the creatures mentioned in the memo, or if this was something the Umbrella people had created and then turned on them.

She turned around. Before adding to the considerable number of creatures in her nightmares, she was looking for the armory, which was in the basement.

She descended down the short flight of stairs. The basement was divided into a few rooms. She picked the one marked "Armory." She opened the door and almost covered her eyes in disappointment. It was a small room, but it was covered with what she recognized as weapons racks. The spare spaces were given over to ammunition boxes.

The problem was that every single one looked empty. No handguns, no rifles, no ammo. Certainly there wasn't a rocket launcher or missle evident. She sighed and got down to the business of scrounging. As she got to the back of the room, something interesting looking showed up. A single handgun, a Baretta similar to the one she already had, was mounted on the gun rack. Below it was a small ammo box.

The ammo box was marked with the Umbrella logo. Prying the box open revealed a number of empty magazines and a few boxes of ammo. Sherry frowned as she saw them. They were marked: "9mm, parabellum. Umbrella anti-BOW rounds." Each bullet had a red stripe around the casing.

"This ought to be good," she said. There were a few lockers as well. They held a number of ammo belts, holsters and so forth. Sherry picked out a neat one that allowed her to either swivel the pistol to shoot from the hip or detatch it by sharply pulling the pistol away from her. The belt also had speed loading spaces where all she had to do was eject her empty clips then slide the new clip directly into the pistol. Her coat had a number of ammo spaces, which she stuffed with the new ammo.

She spent a few minutes dutch loading her old rounds with the new ones and making sure her second gun worked before sitting down to think things out.

Part A: There was no way that she was going to try and kill the Tyrant with her handguns, no matter what the so-called anti-BOW (**B**io-**O**rgantic **W**eapon) round did. They wouldn't kill him and they might even allow him to come after her under the clause that she was interfering with his mission.

Part B: Even if she did manage to kill him, she had no idea how the passage to the real world would be opened up.

She sighed and stood up. It was obvious what she had to do. She had to thouroughly explore this White Umbrella base, exterminate as many of the demon babies as she could and immerse herself in the evil that these scientists created.

She unfolded a little map. "Director's office," she read. Nice and simple. If she was really lucky, all the answers she was looking for was right there.

She almost walked right into it. The office was on the second floor of the structure on the opposite side from where she walked into the base.

She noticed the number of large bullets holes, about three times the size of her thumb, that were in the doorway that blocked the corridor where the office was. She shined her light behind her and noted the number of holes in the concrete wall behind her.

Prudence suggested that she carefully shine the light through one of the holes and be prepared to step back quickly.

What she saw were two peculiar machines sitting next to a surprisingly dim halogen work light. They looked like two olive-green cylinders about four times larger than a coffee can. They had a number of holes and colored lights on them. There was an especially large hole near the top with a hollow tube sticking out that Sherry had no problem in identifying.

Both devices would occasionally rotate about ten degrees.

Sherry scooted away from the door and thought for a moment.

The only thing she could think of them being was a pair of automatic machine gun emplacements. They probably had motion sensors on them that allowed them to track and fire on moving targets. Like the demon babies.

Then a really wicked idea came to her. If she could deactivate the guns, move them to the courtyard and then reactivate them; they might be able to take down Mr. X for her.

It was also possible that the Director's office had been used as some kind of last stand. She could see it now. One of thier "pets" probably got loose and they had to barricade the office.

She frowned. That actually sounded like a really good scenario for what happened; which could mean...

"Hello?" she called out through the door. "Is there anyone there?"

"Yes," she heard back. It was the voice of a man, sounding very familiar. "I'm trapped in here. Can you get me out?"

"Can you deactivate the automatic sentries?"

"Sentries? I'm locked up. I can't move."

Sherry cursed quietly for a few moments.

"All right, I'm going to see if I can find something to turn off the sentries. I'll be right back."

She stood up and hustled down the corridor. He was lucky to survive, whoever he was. She briefly looked at the map. There had to be some sort of technical office.

She quckly found it. "Power Generator/ Electronic Servicing." It was in the basement, right next to where the Armory was. She allowed a brief moment to roll her eyes before jogging to the end of the corridor. Whoever the man in the office was, he was probably an Umbrella employee and deserved to die a horrible death. He was probably the only person who could tell her how to get out of this fragment of hell.

The door to the power generator room was unlocked. Inside was a large, portable generator attached to some heavy cabling that disappeared beneath the floor. Next to the generator was a series of workbenches. She was about to head over to the back where some books were when something caught her eye.

It was two devices. One was a short flashlight with some additional knobs on it. The other was a transparent square with an orange tinge. Sherry grinned for a moment before grabbing the two. One was a flashlight mount. It went underneath the barrel of her Baretta and could either be contiuously on or it could be rigged to turn on when the trigger was depressed slightly.

The other was one of the new holographic sights. When you looked through the sight, a dot appeared where your bullet would go. It was like the old laser sight, but the little red dot wouldn't give away your position.

She allowed herself to revel in this new find for a moment before going back to work. There was a shelf in the back that held a number of books. They were technical manuels, and she hoped to find the one to the sentry guns.

"Here we go. Primary use of the control for the AS-224 is to be used from its master terminal. Please keep this terminal with you at all times." She frowned at that. Did that mean that the master terminal was in the office and she couldn't use it?

She thumbed through the book.

"If the AS-224 master terminal is not available for some reason, a General Purpose Terminal may be reconfigured to act as a master terminal unit."

She looked at the instructions for a moment. Seemed simple enough. Add a few plug and play components, upload the program and she was good to go.

In a few minutes she was back at the hallway. She opened the terminal and started the program up.

"Please work," she prayed.

**Negotiating wth AS-224...**

**Linking...**

**Link successful.**

"Yes!" she shouted. She looked at the stats for the two guns and she whistled. Both were apparently loaded with five-hundred round magazines, and they both had about four-hundred left. She looked around for the right control before pressing the virtual button marked: Stand Down.

The button flashed for a few seconds before sending the message: **Both units standing down. **

She turned off the terminal then cautiously opened the doors. Neither gun twitched.

Blowing out a sigh of relief, she walked to the office and opened the door. Then she stopped and stared for a few moments. At first glance, it looked like most of the offices she had seen so far with a few extra luxuries. There was a covering over most of the metal grating muting the depressing decor. There was what looked like a bed, refridgerator and television.

It was the back of the room that was really bizzare. It looked like a solid wall of smokey-gray glass where the back wall of the room should have been. Behind the glass was a great deal of smoke, but it gave the impression that it stretched out for an eternity. A neat trick considering that the smoke was thick enough that you couldn't see more than a few feet.

Standing just behind the glass was a middle-aged man wearing a white shirt and black slacks.

"Don!" Sherry said. She almost smacked herself for not recognizing his voice.

"Sherry," he said, smiling. "I was worried about you."

"Let's see about getting you out of here," she said as she walked up to the barrier. She drew her sword to give it an experimental tap when she suddenly went flying backwards.

She managed to roll with the unseen blow taking most of the force out of the impact.

"I should have warned you, this isn't an ordinary peice of glass. Its some sort of magical barrier."

Sherry slowly stood up, moving her joints to see if anything came loose. "Any idea on how we can neutralize it?"

"Actually, I do. The man who cast this spell used a medallion. He put it into the upper left drawer of the desk."

The desk was uncomfortably close to the barrier. She opened the drawer. It was empty save for a octogonal medallion made of brass with a satin finish. She gingerly picked it up. On one side was a geometric symbol of some sort she didn't recognize. On the other was the word: "Ophiel."

"So, what do I do with this now? Chant some words? Sacrifice a chicken?"

"I don't know. He just pointed it at me and the barrier appeared."

"Well, let's try this." She held up the talisman, feeling faintly silly. After a few minutes, she sighed and put it in her pocket. "This isn't working, Don. Maybe if I threw the desk at it." She paused after that last statement. "Or I could look through the desk and see if anything useful, like a book of spells, is in there."

She opened the next drawer down. "So, how did you end up here?"

"After you left, I blacked out. When I came to, I was in here. I saw someone put up the barrier, then he left the room."

"Taking the remote terminal for those sentry guns too, I'll bet. I hope he left an instruction manuel." She saw something in the bottom drawer on that side. It was a thin, leatherbound book. The front was blank. The front page read: "Notes on Lobsel Vith."

She frowned. That name sounded familiar. "I think I have something here," she said. She began reading the book. Some of it was insane gibbering. Some of it sounded sane but didn't make sense. Some of it looked insane but looked important.

Then one passage leaped out at her:

**Out of all the subjects, Tommy is showing the most promise. He is one of the few to not succumb to the transformation. Unfortunately, he has grasped some of the arts and is currently hiding from us in a Seal of Metraton. While he is doing this, spells cast under Lobsel Vith appear to have little effect in this general region. Until he is found and neutralized, spells cast, especially the Portal Spell, will need to be cast under a different talisman. **

Sherry smacked herself on the side of her head. How could she forget that creepy kid? He specifically accused her of working for this Lobsel Vith thing. Her mind was racing. Did this mean that he was preventing all spells from working?

She stood up suddenly. It was worth a shot.

"Don, I'm going to try something," she said to him. "Are you going to be okay in there?"

"Well, I'm bored and tired, but nothing has tried to eat me yet."

"I'll be right back."

"All right," she said to herself. "The first thing I'll need are some ropes or cables to lower those sentries to him." She looked on the map. An area was marked as "Supply" on the first floor.

As she was walking down the stairs, she heard the retching hiss of a demon baby. She extended her pistol, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise. She found it trying to peel back a section of metal grating just above her. She quickly aimed upward and fired a few rounds. It quickly went still and began drooling its garish, green ichor.

She frowned yet again as she proceded foward. The demon babies, while very creepy, didn't seem very dangerous. They might pose a problem if they actually got ahold of you, but that didn't explain the lack of personelle here. As she made her way to the supply room, she heard a voice cry out: "Somebody, help me."

It sounded like a very young girl. Shocked, Sherry opened the door. The room was stacked with those little cages she found earlier. All of them had doors that had been bent open. As soon as she entered, three demon babies began crawling towards her.

No time for aimed shots, they were a lot faster than the others. She drew her other gun and began blazing away at them. She got one, then the other fired a squirt of acid at her. She managed to dodge, only to almost blunder right on top of the third. She aimed down and shot it through the top of the head.

She then quickly tried to orient on the last one. She swiveled left, careful to not let her guard down. The last one seemed to have disappeared. She relaxed a smidgen. She took this opportunity to eject one clip, then reload.

"Are you still here?" she called out.

"I'm over here," she heard from the other end of the room. She dashed over. Huddled in one of the cages near the bottom was a little girl, perhaps eight years old. She was filthy and thin. A bag of PTV was attached to the side of the cage and a tube was inserted into her arm.

"Oh my god," Sherry breathed. "Hold on there, I'll get you out."

"Hurry," the girl begged. Sherry took a quick look around before she spotted what she wanted. On one of the cages, one of the iron bars had snapped off. She picked it up.

"Now, don't move. I'm going to pry the door open."

"Hurry," the girl begged again. Suddenly, Sherry couldn't see her, as if a shadow was over her. Sherry instinctively checked her flashlight, then she realized that the light was still shining bright.

"Honey?" she tentatively asked.

As she drew closer to the cage for a better look, she could see the contents of the cage again. She drew back sharply as she saw the demon baby within.

She barely registered the retching hiss as she fell to the floor and aimed her gun. She almost laughed hysterically as she noticed her hand start shaking for the first time during all of this hellishness.

She gritted her teeth together as she slowly stood back up. She heard the sounds of someone sobbing as she aimed the automatic into the cage. The monster slammed one hand at the door and it bent under the blow, its obscene green tongue slithered between the cage bars.

She pulled the trigger and watched as the bullet sparked on a cage nearby. She watched as each bullet came closer to the target. Finally, a ragged hole appeared just above the left eye.

She pulled the trigger again and another bullet let fly. The gun deformed as it tried to chamber the empty magazine.

She once again heard the sound of someone sobbing. As she lowered her arm, reality once again descended on her and she realized that it was her. She dully and mechanically ejected the empty clip, inserted a fresh one, then chambered a round. She looked at the body of the demon baby she had just killed.

At the remains of the little child she had just killed.

"GodDammit!" she exploded, kicking one of the other cages with as much force as she could muster. "You goddamn sonofbitches! You couldn't be happy with Raccoon! You had to come and bring your filth here too!"

She picked up one of the heavy cages and flung it against the wall. She sat down heavily as she tried to calm down. "The next time I meet one of you sonsofbitches, I'm going to cap you right between the eyes," she vowed.

She reluctantly stood up. Before asskicking could commence, she had to live through this.

After that, going to Supply was easy. A helpful amount of ropes, cinches and pulleys was laid out. Getting the automatic sentries lowered into position was difficult, but the monstrous Mr. X made it easy by standing still.

"Now, lets see how well you stand up to this," she said. She pressed the button on the screen marked **Activate Unit 6, Activate Unit 8.** Sherry then tapped the button marked under unit 8 as **Manuel Targeting.** She used the reticule to aim the crude digital image onto Mr. X. She locked the sentry onto the target and pressed the **Fire** button. She heard the chatter of machine gun fire and the enraged howl of Mr. X. The howl chilled her as she remembered hiding in the train that was to take her and Claire away from the horror of Raccoon City. She had heard that inhuman cry when Mr. X had fought with Claire while she had huddled alone in that train.

She heard something on top of all that racket. A sound like the dying scream of yesterday, or the sigh of a score of damned souls.

She ignored the sound and looked down from the roof of the structure. Mr. X's long coat was tattered and full of holes as he resolutely marched for the sentry.

Sherry pressed the virtual button on the screen. **"Unit 6, Motion Activate On. Unit 8, Motion Activate On." **Both sentries started firing and Sherry let out a big breath that she hadn't realized she had been holding. So far, so good.

Not that she could afford to relax until Mr. X was dead, but she couldn't do anything else until the sentries were exhausted.

The sound grew in volume. Sherry frowned. It seemed to be coming from her pocket where she had placed the Ophiel talisman. She took the talisman out. The symbol on the front and the text on the back was slowly disappearing. She frowned as she saw that.

"What on Earth?" she said to herself. It sort of looked like the time that red symbol got onto her PDA.

On that thought, she took out her PDA. Flashing on the screen was the incomplete Ophiel symbol. In a few minutes, the talisman was a blank disk and the symbol was on her PDA.

A crash got her attention back to the action. She looked over the side and saw Mr. X smash the sentry he had knocked over.

"Ah, crap."

Mr. X was in the perfect position to smash the other sentry. She had made the mistake of placing the sentries in such a way that they wouldn't shoot at each other, but now both were going to be destroyed before they could finish the job. She had to do something.

There was only one chance. She left the terminal behind as she dashed for the door. If she could get to the door behind Mr. X and take a few shots at him, he might turn to get her and put himself back into the field of fire. As she was running for the door, it occured to her that getting Mr. X to chase her again might not be the brightest thing to do.

She burst through the doors ready to do battle. She was in time, the brute was about ready to smash the sentry. She whipped out both pistols and began blazing away. While she didn't expect to do any real damage, she didn't expect him to simply ignore her.

"Come on, come after me," she muttered, swiftly ejecting the now empty clips and pulling a speed load from her belt.

It was all for nothing as Mr. X simply raised one of his ham-like fists and smashed the offending machine. He then turned around and looked straight at Sherry.

It reminded Sherry of the time when she was looking into the transport shaft down to her father's lab. The knowledge that certain death awaited her down there. Only Claire was able to get her moving again.

Sherry had to come up with a new plan quick. She quickly came up with and discarded plans as she reloaded and manuvered to get more space between her and the monster.

Plan A, shoot him until he's dead. One look at his wounds convinced her not to try that seriously. His clothes were tattered and shredded by the sentry, but there was little sign that he was feeling any pain or that it had seriously wounded him. This nixed the next plan to somehow grab the sentry units.

Plan B, run away as fast as possible. This plan sounded appealing until she remembered that she couldn't go anywhere. Here is where she had to be.

Plan C, use the Ophiel symbol to activate the portal?

She thought about the Ophiel symbol on her PDA and suddenly, she was overcome with a massive headache. The feeling was incredible, like she could feel the pain as a contamination in her blood as it zipped around her brain, causing whole areas to light up in pain at a time.

As she staggered she managed to holster one gun. She didn't think she could shoot both at the same time. She then aimed the other one at Mr. X, hoping to keep him at bay until she could crawl away.

That was when she noticed the symbol of Ophiel glowing on the side of the pistol.

"Nothing ventured..." she gritted out, pulling the trigger.

The effect was incredible. Mr. X stopped for a moment. His form became shadowy and she could dimly see the shape of a small boy inside him. It only lasted for a moment. Also, a fresh wave of pain flowed into her head, causing her to go to one knee with the sensation of someone using the back of her head as an icepick pincushion.

The form of Mr. X wavered then solidified again.

Sherry squinted with the pain and lifted the gun which seemed to weigh down her arm, dragging itself down.

Mr. X then did something that Sherry never remembered him doing before.

He smiled.

At that moment, the pain went away. Feeling somewhat detatched, she stood up and lifted both guns, the symbol for Ophiel glowing brightly on each gun. She could not feel them in her hand, but she fired each one as rapidly as she could. She could not feel the recoil as the bullets flew. She could see each bullet as they hit the target. The form of Mr. X would flicker out, leaving the form of the child before solidifying in time for the next round to hit.

Finally, it happened. The first gun deformed as it ran dry. The boy, Tommy, looked at her balefully with his black eyes. He had opened his mouth to reveal needle-sharp teeth in the split second that she pulled the trigger on the second gun.

The round hit him directly in the middle of the forehead. He fell backward without fanfare. The feeling of detatchment left her a bit and she looked down at her pistols. The symbol of Ophiel faded a bit, then disappeared.

Once that happened, the headache appeared again. She dimly felt herself fall to the ground. She could feel a wetness on her cheeks. Had she been crying for Tommy?

She heard a sound like that of the Ophiel symbol, the wail of damned souls. It got louder and Sherry realized that it was merely the sound of a klaxon. She was able to stagger to her feet, though the pain was still hot and fresh in her mind. She absently wiped the tears from her cheek.

She wasn't sure what made her look, but she lowered her head to look at her hand. Instead of the clear salt water of her tears, she saw the dark red of her blood.

"What the?" she started to say.

That's when the ground lurched beneath her feet.

"Gah!" she said falling, bumping her head against the metal floor. She didn't think it was possible, but her headache became twice as intense without her loosing consciousness. As she lay there, the rusted, blood-stained metal grating changed, slowly melting away. It was replaced with a concrete walkway, and a small park, of all things. She watched as the sinister Midwich Labs facility became a slightly more benign building, roughly the same size with the same dimensions.

She smiled as light appeared, and she was able to see without a flashlight. She glanced up at the sky, and was surprised to see no blue and flakes of snow coming down. She tried to catch one of the flakes on her tongue.

She immediately regretted succeeding as the flake tasted bitter. She spat out the water, then took an experimental whiff. The air did not have the bracing bite of winter but had the odor of old machine oil.

"Am I back?" she asked herself. There was a thin layer of fog over the ground.

The headache had receded slowly so that it was now bearable. She reloaded her guns while she tried to come up with a plan. The first thing was to find out if she was back in the real world.

She entered through the double doors. The first thing to catch her attention was a large, brightly colored bulletin board. "Midwich Elementary School" were the words boldly displayed. Sherry looked at the words for a moment. The Midwich Elementary School, one of the locations marked on that mysterious map she had collected.

"They collected the kids they used in the experiments right from this school," Sherry said to herself. She could see it now. Some of the children would be taken to a "special room," to be experimented on.

"Dammit," she gritted out, punching the wall once. She immediately regretted it as the minor shock caused her slowly receding headache to pulse again.

She made her way to the bathroom. The lights and water weren't working, but the paper towels and toilet paper worked, as did the mirror. She gasped a bit in shock as she got a good look at herself in the mirror. The blood had crusted around her eyes making her look slightly zombie-like herself. In addition, when she had tried to rub her "tears" away, she had left a red blob over half her face.

She managed to wipe away most of it, except for a few stubborn clots in her eyebrows.

She sighed as she rested her forehead against the cool glass of the mirror. She wished she had something to eat or drink, or that she dared to take a nap.

"Stupid town," she muttered to herself.

Feeling a bit rested, she left the school. As she walked through the fog, she saw something that convinced her that she was definately not back in the real world. There was a police car parked in front of the school. It had been driven up to the steps. A corpse in the tattered remnents of a police uniform had been transfixed to the hood of the car. The body had been pierced with nails, spikes, rebar and other metal objects.

Sherry tasted a bit of bile in her mouth. She was surprised and pleased in a perverse way as she spat it away. She had been afraid that this town had gotten her too used to all the gore.

She searched the cop and the car. The cop was only armed with a billy club attached to the side of his belt. The interior was more promising. Sherry found an automatic rifle that she couldn't identify. It was made entirely of plastic, including the transparent magazine clip. The clip was fully loaded with standard NATO 5.56mm rounds but no other clips were forthcoming.

"Thank you," she said to the fallen police officer as she slung the rifle over her shoulder.

She studied the map of the town. The third circle was a tiny, nameless island in the middle of Toulca Lake. She could only imagine what horrible creatures could be lurking in the lake. Her best option was to try and find a boat in one of the town's two harbors.

She walked carefully down Bachman Road. The monsters were still roving about the town, but nothing appeared that she couldn't handle. One dog and two normal-sized zombies were the biggest problems that she couldn't get around.

Sherry had made it down to the pier when she heard it. It was the hiss of a Licker, one of the creatures of Raccoon City. She quietly holstered her two hand guns and unslung the rifle on her back.

That's when she saw it. It crawled out of the water, looking just as she remembered them. Its body was red in color and looked like a man that had been turned inside out. This illusion was enhanced by the exposed brain. The click of its talons as it crawled up the side of the concrete pier was loud and clear to Sherry.

She held her rifle at ready and held her breath as it crawled to the surface. It was tempting to shoot the thing, but she wasn't about to waste the shots on the best weapon she had unless she had to.

She let out her breath as it moved on down the pier. She moved out cautiously, then she jumped the short distance to the small ship docked nearby. She then entered the cabin quickly. It was a decently sized fishing boat. She really didn't know that much about boats, but this one also had a sturdy-looking rowboat hitched to the side. If all else failed, she could always drop it into the water and row to the island.

She moved carefully into the bridge. There, she saw something that made her pause. It was three clips of the same type of ammunition that her machine gun used.

"Hello, is there anyone here?" she called out. She could accept that there would be a dead cop carrying this type of hardware, but finding these clips on this boat was highly suspicious. Cursing under her breath, she put the clips in her coat and tried to start the motor.

Cursing some more, she got into the launch and lowered it down into the murky water.

To be continued...

Next part: Depth.


	3. Depth

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Part 3/7**

**By Fenris Ulf**

Disclaimer: I do not own either Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Or any of the cool weapons. Darn it.

She had never really rowed a boat before, and like all beginners since the beginning of time, she spent a lot of effort into going around in very slow circles. She rowed with one arm while forgetting about using the other one. She cursed and swore and vowed to get even with the sadistic madman who invented the infernal device. Still, Sherry Birkin was the child of genius, so it only took her an hour to get the hang of the boat enough to make slow and unsteady progress for the island in the center of the lake.

She touched down on the tiny island. It was really tiny, a person could walk the entire length in twenty minutes. Which made the stone monoliths in the center easy to see.

Sherry looked at the stones. They weren't all that big, each one was about her height, but their shape and placement reminded her of Stonehenge.

"Stonehenge." Sherry looked at the standing stones for a few moments.

That was when she realized that she was straining to see them clearly, because it was getting dark.

"What the...?" Slowly at first, the entire area grew pitch black. She swiftly turned on her flashlight. She examined the stones. They were covered with carvings similar to the ones that she had on her PDA. She looked at the center stone, and she saw the familiar circle.

She got out her PDA and tapped the red symbol. It filled the screen and glared at her. She turned it so that it faced the symbol on the monolith.

"Gah," she gasped out as the pain began. The symbol on the monolith began to bleed. The blood then glowed, making it easy to see. Sherry spat out the blood pooling in her own mouth as she grimly hung on.

She heard the klaxon somewhere in the distance as the ground shook beneath her. The shaking drove her to one knee, but she held up the symbol. That was when she noticed the small hill with the stones was lowering into the ground. Earth was swiftly replace with a metal elevator shaft.

Sherry put the PDA away and got out her handguns. This was where things usually got ugly.

Just when she thought that the shaft went down to the center of the Earth, it stopped. Across from the blood-red circle was a high-tech looking, metal sliding door. The sort of thing that you'd expect to see in a White Umbrella facility.

Sherry sighed. "Maybe I was better off with the other monsters."

The doors slid aside quietly and smoothly when she got close enough. No killer monsters, killer security systems or nasty alarms. Not that that meant anything.

She cautiously entered the corridor. Instead of the clean lines of an Umbrella lab, it looked like the rusted, scabarous version of itself.

She turned to look as the doors closed shut behind her. No sooner than that event happened when she heard the retching hiss of the demon babies. She saw it in the dim light of the corridor. It had somehow acquired a pair of rotted zombie legs and was shambling its way over to her, its long, obscene tongue darting back and forth at her.

She paused for a moment to track its slow movements before shooting. Its head jerked back as the liquid-filled round smashed into it.

As it collapsed to the ground, Sherry saw something that made the bile rise in her again. The body became transparent and she could see someone else in its place. It was a young oriental man wearing a lab coat with the Umbrella symbol on it. Though he might have done unspeakable evil, what happened to him was not the just deserts of whatever blasphemous experiments he had participated in. Someone had done this to him.

The image did not go away as Sherry stared at it. She stared at the walls and found that she couldn't get away from it. She could see the old, clean lines with the layers of corruption over it.

Sherry was startled when her PDA beeped again. She took it out and looked at it. Some text was appearing on the screen.

"_Favored child. Come this way."_

The text then disappeared to be replaced with a floorplan. There was a green dot followed by some yellow arrows going down the corridor.

Sherry carefully followed the arrows. They led around corners and through doors. When she came to a security checkpoint, some instructions would appear to allow her to pass. She didn't see a single monster or zombie.

In a way, that made her more nervous than if she had to wade through them. While dangerous, the monsters she had encountered were not filled with malice, they were only driven by the terrible desire to devour her.

She glanced down at the tiny computer in her hand. Whoever was giving her this information probably wasn't going to have anything nearly as pleasent in mind.

She entered a cavernous room listed as the "South Specimen Storage Area."

"Welcome, Miss Birkin," came a familiar voice.

At the back of the room was a familiar looking barrier. It looked like a wall made of grey glass. She looked at the man.

"I should have known it was you," she said. "Ordinary evil couldn't have come up with all of this."

Don Simpson smiled at her. "Yes, it was all my doing. The hardest part was trying to figure out how to lure you here. Take a look at the diary."

Sherry took out the book. She was not dismayed or surprised to see that all the pages were blank except for the warning at the very end.

"It took me a long time to find that. No one really knew what happened in the final days of Raccoon City. Or, no one that currently works for White Umbrella."

She looked at him behind his barrier and began to seeth.

"Then you'll ask yourself why did I go through all the trouble of getting you here. The answer is this."

He held up a device that Sherry recognized as a pistol syringe. The liquid inside was a bright, purple color.

"The G-virus," she said to him.

"Yes. Thanks to this place, this town, the nightmare of the people who come here can be turned into reality. I have never seen the G-virus. Perhaps you have not seen it either, but you were near it, you experienced its awesome power. I was hoping that that would be enough."

"And how were you planning to take it from this place of dreams?" she asked him.

He then grinned one of the most evil grins Sherry had ever seen. He then stabbed himself in the stomach with the needle and he pulled the trigger.

Sherry recoiled as his eyes turned red.

"Grahhhhh!" he bellowed. His muscles bulged.

Sherry backed off as she wondered if it was any use to run away.

His shirt ripped as his chest bulged again. Sherry saw a metal disk fall from his pocket.

She hoped that it would work. She pulled out the PDA and she held it out at the disk. She instantly heard the sound of the chorus of the damned and knew it was working.

She then regretted it as she went to one knee with the massive headache pounded at her. This time, the pain was accompanied by a dreadful ringing in her ear. She hoped that the disk would give her enough power to get back to reality. She tried putting a hand over her ear to block the ringing sound, even though she knew that it wouldn't work.

She felt a wetness there. She looked at her hand expecting to see blood. What she saw was a clear fluid. "With my luck, its cerebral fluid," she muttered before a heavy pain boring into the center of her skull caused her to grey out for a moment.

"Gah!"

Then, the pain was gone.

She unsteadily stood up and looked up at the sound of something cracking. It was the barrier that separated her from Don. As his body mutated with the sound of snapping bones, cracks appeared in the smoky glass.

Sherry was now acutely aware that that barrier was the only thing between her and the new G-virus Tyrant.

"Not good," she said shortly, bringing her new rifle to bear, for all the good it would do. She briefly debated on whether or not she should use the Ophiel symbol, but she couldn't depend on it. She backed up toward the door and watched as the glass broke. Instead of showering Don with shards, the barrier dissolved as it began to fall.

She opened the door and fell into the hallway as Don's mocking laughter boomed out over the hall.

She ran through the corrupted hallways, wondering when the Tyrant would rip through the walls to get at her. Or maybe he was merely waiting for his ultimate evolution into that hideous thing that simply expanded as a festering mass of teeth and tentacles. One of the doors opened as she passed it, and she gratefully darted in.

She spent a few moments sitting on the floor, gasping for air. She had been in pretty good shape, but it had been a while since she had anything to eat or drink.

As she looked around, the strange dictonomy overcame her again. She could see the facility as corrupted and disease-ridden. She could also see under that to the way it used to look.

In looking around, she could not see the bustle of people as she had earlier back at Toulca Labs. It took her a moment to understand why. The Toulca Labs had only a minor connection with White Umbrella. She would not find it surprising to find out that Don Simpson had been working there.

This place, however, was a White Umbrella facility through and through. Likely, when he had been ready, he had brought his people to the other side of the nightmare and did horrible things to them.

She clasped her hands together and tried to think.

The monster stalked the halls of the facility. He was powerful, no door could bar his way, no wall could stand between him and his prey. The demon zombies, men and women who had once done his bidding, were now no more than mere playthings under his might.

He burst into a room and saw something before him.

It was a woman, standing in the middle of the holding bay. The holding bay was a large room, equivalent to the size of a hanger bay. Her leather coat was puddled on the ground at her feet and she looked upon him without fear.

"I don't know if you're human enough to hear me, or understand me, Don. You lured me here in order to get a hold of a sample of the G-virus. It was a mistake. My father, evil as he was, was a genius. If you were half as smart as he was, you could have made the virus yourself."

The monster stopped, confused. It could comprehend creatures attacking it for dominence or attacking prey for food, but this girl was confusing.

"I don't know what you had in mind when you gave me these, if it was you, but now, I guess its time to show you how they really work."

She closed her eyes and a clear fluid trickled from her ear. A glowing symbol appeared on her cheek and the monster felt something else. It felt fear.

Before it could attack, sheets of smoke-grey glass appeared throughout the bay. Before it could take the half step that would bring it close enough to rip out her throat, another barrier sprang up, suddenly making her as far away as the dark side of the moon.

"Gahhh!" the monster bellowed as it slammed into the barrier.

Sherry watched him dispassionately for a moment before she raised both her hands, palm up to reveal the glowing symbol of Ophiel and the red symbol also glowing balefully.

In the center of the pen appeared a black lump of charred flesh. The monster turned around to look at it as it heard the heavy thump of it falling to the ground.

The mass began to expand and with the sound of breaking fingers, it began to stand up. It bulked huge with four arms, each one terminating in a lethal arrangement of bone spikes and claws. Set into its chest like melted wax was the flattened face of a human being. On one of its arms, a grotesque eyeball looked out over the surroundings.

Both monsters paused for a moment before launching themselves at each other with mindless ferocity.

The creature who had once been Don Simpson had not changed much, as these mutations went. He had grown a few feet taller with his jaw turned into the maw of a lamprey with rows of razor sharp teeth. His arms were both a dead grey color and covered with a scabarous carapace. He began by hitting the other monster who then slashed out with his murderous arms.

Sherry watched as first one monster, then the other would inflict dreadful damage on each other. She was not afraid this time, as she heard the awful wail of damned souls and saw Don Simpson's monstrous form fade away to be replaced by his more familiar one.

The other monster gave him a vicious swipe that sent him across the room.

"William Birkin," she called out to the monstrous form.

"Father," she said. The creature turned to look at her. One of its arms had been ripped off, and severe damage had been done to various parts of its torso.

There was nothing she could say, nothing to convey her wish to say good-bye, her hate of what he had become, her love. She let the symbols of the Dark Gods of Silent Hill vanish from her body and let the grey barrier and the monster dissolve back into nightmare.

"Ughhh," she groaned as the headache once more caused her to fall to her knees. With a great deal of effort, she put her coat back on and staggered to the pitiful body of Don Simpson.

He should have been dead. Various bones were sticking out of his tattered flesh like pikes over old battlefields. His body was crushed in some places, lacerated in others. He should have been killed when the first blow struck, or when his lifeblood spurted out of the various cuts.

He was weakly laughing at her.

"The G-virus revitalizes cellular function," she said to him.

"Yes, but there's something that you should know. Those who bind themselves to more than one of the Gods of Silent Hill are drawn too deeply into the darkness to ever return to the light."

He began to laugh, but gave out a rattling choke instead. He then began to dissolve into a pool of sanguine, his body bubbling as it melted away. In a few seconds, he was a red pool that was slowly congealing like an open wound.

She stood there watching his corpse as she heard the wail of the klaxon drawing her deeper into the nightmare realm.

To be continued...

Next part: Cyst.


	4. Cyst

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Part 4/7**

**By Fenris Ulf**

Disclaimer: Capcom owns Resident Evil and Konami owns Silent Hill.

The darkness pressed in all around her. It seemed to go on forever as the nightmare that Don had spawned faded away with his once human body. The lab faded away, leaving Sherry alone with her thoughts. She stood up, a pistol in her hand.

Was he right? Had she doomed herself to an eternity of darkness when she had collected the talismans?

She felt her alter stone in her pocket. A little peice of technology that was almost meaningless except as a means of interfacing with the nameless powers that now threatened to press in all around her.

She dared not turn on her light, she dared not talk or fire her weapons. She was afraid to move, she was afraid to walk. More so than Raccoon City, more than any other time in this benighted town.

She knew that the creatures of her nightmares were just beyond her perception. They were waiting for her: zombies, zombie dogs, zombie crows, Lickers, Tyrants and other Umbrella chimeras. They were out in the darkness, waiting for her.

Suddenly, a bitter wind blew past her. It smelled of rust and rotting flesh, but it was cool and broke up the stale air of the metal grating under her feet.

She inhaled the wind and managed not to gag on the sickly sweet smell of rotting human flesh. She put one foot in front of the other. Suddenly, she knew what she had to do.

She had to redeem her legacy. She had to make up for everything that her parents had done, including what Don had done. She had to survive this hellhole and make it back to the waking world.

She holstered the pisol and unslings the rifle. She walked foward determined to go back.

Some time later, she was sitting down. Determination was one thing, but she was tired. She didn't really feel thristy or hungry anymore, but she had been on the move for a very long time. She had been on the move, under hostile action and she could use a breather.

That's when she heard it. The heavy foot falls of someone or something approaching her position.

She got her rifle ready when she heard a voice in the darkness. "Is there anyone human out here?"

Sherry carefully stood up, incredulous. Was he a victim like her or a man like Don?

"I'm here," she said, turning on her flashlight.

The foot falls grew faster and a man turned a corner. He was an older man with long hair more grey than black. He had a short beard and was wearing black body armor of some sort with a black overcoat over the whole thing. He was armed with an AK-47.

"Turn that off. Do you want every thing to come running for us?" He held out a hand. "Ben Morrison."

She looked at him for a moment. "Sherry Birkin," she said, grasping his hand.

"Now, turn that damn thing off and come with me."

Under the cover of darkness, they moved across the landscape. Every now and then, something would come at them and they had to kill it before moving on.

After an eternity and fifteen minutes, they both approached a large structure with a heavy iron gate in front. Ben reached into his coat and withdrew a key. He inserted it into the gate and turned it. There was a click, then the massive gates parted.

"Come on," he said to her, "no one's going to harm you in here."

She walked with him into the building.

"Welcome to the Alchemilla Hospital." This remark came from a pretty woman in a nurses uniform with a red cardigan sweater and a green armband. She was a little older than Sherry and she had a burn mark on her cheek in a rounded diamond shape.

"Hi," Sherry got out. She looked around in amazement. The hospital seemed to be completely normal. It was composed of clean lines and surfaces. "I'm going to clean up, Lisa," Ben said.

"All right." She turned toward Sherry. "My name is Lisa Garland."

"Uh, Sherry. Sherry Birkin. What is this place?"

"Come with me. I'll get you settled down. While we walk, I'll answer your questions the best that I can." They began walking. "Well, the best way I can describe this place is that its an oasis. Our oasis in the darkness. Of course, its not totally free of its own weirdness, but its not a constant horror film."

"And, how did he know I was out there?"

"That part is a little more complicated. Let's get you to your room."

Lisa took Sherry up to the third floor. She opened one of the patient rooms. The room was tiny, not more than a small cot and a night stand. "Its not much, but I guarantee that its safe. Do you want to take a nap?"

"I'm tired, but I don't feel like sleeping." She sat down on the edge of the bed. "I wasn't able to get a good night sleep for years after Raccoon City, and I think that'll be even worse now."

"Raccoon City? What happened there?"

Sherry looked up at Lisa. "You've been here for a while, haven't you?"

Lisa gave her a tired little smile. "Sometimes, it feels like I've been here forever."

"I see. Is there some place I can take a shower or bath around here?"

"There's a communal shower on this floor. Don't worry though. There's only a few people on this level, so you'll still have lots of privacy."

"Any chance of extra clothes?"

"I think that there might be some in the store room. I'm not sure if it'll fit."

"Let's go there first."

"This wasn't here before," Lisa said.

"I see," Sherry said, looking at the items in question. "When you said this place wasn't free of its own weirdness, you weren't kidding." She looked at the luggage, all of which bore the initials SB. "On the bright side, I don't think I'll have much trouble getting some clothes that will fit me."

Lisa nodded. "When you're done taking a shower, meet me down in the reception area. I'll fix you something to eat."

Ben was there. "How's our newest arrival?"

Lisa shook her head. "I think that she has to be one of the bravest people I've ever met. She used to live in a place called Raccoon City."

Ben whistled. "She used to live in Raccoon City? Was she actually there? I didn't think that anyone who was there was still alive after they nuked the place."

Lisa stared at him for a while. "They used a nuclear bomb? On American soil?"

"It was probably a good thing that they did," Sherry said. "The T-virus had spread through the entire city. If they hadn't, it might have spread through the country. Unfortunately, it also destroyed all the evidence too, but I learned a long time ago that you can't have everything. I couldn't find any towels."

"What?" Lisa asked her, her mouth open.

"Towels, so I could dry off after taking a shower."

"I think we shocked Lisa off her rocker. I'll show you where the towels are."

The kitchen was fully stocked, though nothing really fancy was there.

"I know that I'm going to regret asking this, but where does all the food come from?"

Ben looked back at her. "To tell you the truth, we just don't know. Sometimes the food just appears in the freezer. Sometimes we'll hear a thump on the roof and we'll find boxes. Sometimes we'll be going over a storage room and we'll find some food."

Sherry dug out a frozen dinner. It boasted a sirloin steak.

"Is there anyone else in this place?"

"There are a few more. You'll meet them all in time. I usually eat my meals on the roof. You can meet Melvin."

"Melvin?"

"Yeah, he's an astrophysicist. He wandered in here and the first thing he wanted to do was try and explain this place in scientific terms."

They took the elevator to the third floor, then made the short hike to the roof. Melvin was about thirty years old. He was wearing a camoflage, military outfit with a red bandana on his head.

"Hey, Melvin."

Melvin tore himself away from a display screen to look up at Ben.

"Hey Ben."

"Melvin, this is our newest resident, Sherry Birkin."

"Hi," she said to him.

He held out his hand. "Melvin Bricker. Pleased to meet you." She shook his hand. He pointed to her TV dinner. "That looks like a pretty good idea."

"One step ahead of you," Ben said. He produced a second frozen dinner.

"Thanks, Ben." Melvin got out a utensil set and began eating.

Sherry looked over his equipment. Some she recognized, some she didn't. "Pardon me for asking, but what are you doing here?"

"Well, I'm trying to explain all this," he said, gesturing at the empty blackness of the sky. "We can talk about dark gods and magic, but I believe that as long as we have something we can touch and see, it can be exlplained. I know it sounds hopeless, but that's what I believe."

"Have you made any progress," she asked.

"I've made more progress in the negative more than the positive."

"Huh?" Sherry responded.

"What I mean is that I know what we aren't dealing with. For instance, the gravity of this place is Earth normal, so we probably aren't on another planet. There are no lights or other radiation sources above us," he said pointing to the dark panels mounted on some metal pipes.

"What are those?" Sherry asked him.

"These are just X-ray film mounted on some electromagnetic transparent filters. They aren't the best for this kind of work, but its the best we have."

"Also, I find it very interesting that the creatures out there generate a radio signal." He pointed at an oscilloscope. "I've been trying to see if its tied to anything else." He stood up and stretched. "Well, I'm going to take a break. See you later you two."

"He's not as cracked as I thought he'd be," Sherry said.

"He's okay. Better than that psychiatrist who came through here convinced that we were all figments of his imagination."

They ate for a few moments in companionable silence before Sherry looked at her dinner partner. "Ben, I know I'm going to regret asking, but why are you here?"

He paused for a moment. "Well, its another horror story, I'm afraid. I served in Vietnam, and something happened to me over there. Its like, my conscious shut off once I left the States. I became one of those soldiers that you hear about sometimes. I killed inncocent people, tortured them, and worse. If it was evil, I probably did it. For some reason, when me and my squad were taken in on charges, we all got off pretty light. A few months in a stockade and a dishonorable discharge.

"When I came back home, my conscious came back to me. I regretted everything I did and I tried my best to self-distruct.

"Then one day, I wandered into Silent Hill. I guess you know what happened next."

"So, Lisa. Ben told me that there are more people here. Can I meet some of them?"

"Well, most of them are out combing the dark, trying to find a way home. I think that Brad's here, but he was wounded and he's resting. Melvin's probably here, he'll be on the roof if you want to see him. Then there's Jim."

"Jim? What about Jim? You make him sound like a disease or something."

"He's very odd compared to most of the people who make it to this hospital. He came in here demanding sanctuary. We found out that he was with that cult in Silent Hill. He was so crazy that we put him in the psyche ward in here. That made him happy, for some reason. Whenever someone goes out into the dark, they tend to make it a point to consult him first."

"Well, I guess I might as well talk to him too."

"Sherry Birkin. I'm so glad you made it. I was worried that Corporal Morrison wasn't going to take me seriously when I told him about you."

Sherry nodded. "Then, I have you to thank for my rescue. How did you know I was coming?"

He pointed to one of the walls. It was actually a large, padded room, about twenty-feet square. The walls were completely covered in dark red lettering.

The part that he pointed to merely said: "She is coming."

"There's more to it then that," he said to her. "In this place, the Will shapes the Word. Usually, it brings our most powerful feelings to life, and the oldest and most powerful feelings of the human race is fear."

"What do you mean by the Word?"

"Magic is made out of thoughts, and we humans express our thoughts as Words. Some thoughts and some words have more power than others."

Sherry looked at the rest of the walls. They were covered with everything from elegant writing from some of the most sublime works of man to the most childish scribble. There were symbols that took from the holiest of signs to the most evil.

The writting was so complex and intertwined that it was hard to keep track of where you were looking.

"Did you want me to do something for you?"

"Yes, I do, but its something that you're not going to find easy. I can tell that you have some of the symbols of the gods of Silent Hill, but I can't tell which ones. Will you show me?"

"Uh, sure," she said. She brought out her PDA.

"Hm. You have Ophiel, Lobsel Vith, and God herself! That's impressive." He gave it back to her. "Give me a while longer. I know that you're the key to making my dreams come true. What I don't know is why you are the key, or how I will use you."

"Can you help me get home?" she asked him.

"I don't know that either. I may want to talk to you again. I'll leave a message."

So it was that Sherry got into life at the Alchemilla Hospital. She helped Lisa tend to the wounded that staggered in, she accompanied Ben on his attempts to keep the perimeter of the hospital clear of monsters. Without the sun, the time seemed to blend together.

One day, while Sherry was talking with Ben and Lisa in the Director's office, they all saw the walls bleed.

"I need to see all of you now. Jim," read the blood-red letters. It only lasted for a few moments until it faded away.

"I guess we'd better see what he wants," Ben said.

They opened the door to the room and the three of them gaped at it. The room was now huge. The scribbles now changed and flowed every second.

"Please, come in," said a figure in the center of the room. Jim was dressed in a white shirt and pants, which were also covered in red writing. "I now understand."

"Jim, what is gong on?" Lisa asked him.

"Yes, if anyone deserves to know, it is you."

Then, Sherry had a vision. She seemed to look at a staic filled film. A woman had her head down on a table.

_"What is it?_

_Still has an unusually high fever..._

_Eyes don't open..._

_Getting a pulse..._

_But just barely breathing._

_Her skin is all charred!_

_Even when I change the bandages,_

_the blood and pus just start oozing through!_

_Why..._

_What is keeping that child alive?_

_I... can't stand it any longer..._

_I won't tell a soul... Promise._

_So please..."_

"Do you remember this, Lisa?" Jim asked her.

"I remember," she said, her face as white as a sheet. "They wouldn't let me go. I couldn't take it anymore. I took her off the PTV and replaced it with a morphine drip."

"God remembered your kindness and tried to protect you."

Lisa covered her eyes with her hands. "Protect me? It would have been kinder to let me die."

"God didn't see it that way. Do any of you know the story of God?"

Each shook thier head. "Then listen. In the days of old, man was immortal, but not perfect. He grew old and infirm, he was beset with disease and sores, and he was wounded with arrows, but he could not die. His suffering went on, until one day, God was born to a man and a woman. God heard thier pleas and ended thier suffering. Then God started to build Paradise, and to help her, she created many beings. The Red god, Xuchilbara and the Yellow god, Lobsel Vith, and many more besides. However, God was tired, and died of weariness. She said that one day, she would return and lead the people to Paradise."

"Is that what you people believe?" Sherry asked him.

"If you ask if that is what I believe exactly, then no. That's why I was running away. The others were afraid of the answers I would find if I looked too closely into the workings of God. Now you're going to ask what this has to do with all of you."

Jim stood up. "Alessa Guillespe was carrying God within her when her mother burned her alive. When you stopped her PTV, that allowed her to call to her other half and merge them together. Later on, Alessa's avatar did something extraordinary to you, Lisa Garland. Have you never wondered why this place is as free of the darkness as it is? How you returned from death, from being one of the monsters here?"

"I have wondered," she said to him. Here she shivered slightly. "I'm afraid of the answer though. I don't know how long I've been here, wandering in the dark. I don't know if I'm alive or dead, if I've been saved or damned. I don't know what to do or if I can go back. Will your answer help me?"

He paused for a moment, his whole body quivering with some intense, suppressed emotion. He then relaxed suddenly. "I think that, with your help Lisa Garland, I may be able to send some of these people home."

To be continued...

Next part: Touchstone.


	5. Touchstone

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Part 5/7**

**By Fenris Ulf**

Disclaimer: I do not own any of this. If this gives you nightmares, that means you can't blame me.

For a moment, no one breathed a word.

"Really?" Lisa asked him. "Is it really possible?"

"The forces at work in this place makes it impossible to move everyone," Jim said to her, "but I think there's a good chance that most of the people who wander into this place can make it. It will be hard, however."

Lisa, her eyes shining brightly, turned to Ben and Sherry. "Will you help?"

Sherry looked carefully at Jim. His face was an unholy rictus of ecstacy, a mirror of the wax image of her mother, which was frozen in a rictus of hate. Still, she knew almost nothing of the dark realm.

"Of course I'll help," she said to the nurse.

"Count me in," Ben said to her.

"Lisa, I'll need someone to help me with my plans. Ben, if you could round up everyone that's here and keep them in the hospital."

"What do I do?" Sherry asked, not the sudden messiah, but Ben.

Ben scratched at his beard for a moment. "Take an inventory: weapons, ammo, food. See what we have, what we might need, and what can be converted."

"For what sort of mission load?" she asked, this time looking at the wiry mystic.

No one spoke for a few moment. Ben sighed, then signaled to Sherry. "I think that we'll leave you two alone for a while."

"I'll talk to you later, Ben," Lisa said.

As the two left the ward behind them, Sherry looked up at Ben. "I don't trust that Jim guy," she said bluntly.

"I've always thought that he was crazy, but we can't stay here forever. We have to try something."

Sherry nodded. "For now, I'll just concentrate on inventorying what we have in the way of weapons and medical supplies. I hope this all works out."

It was hard to say in this place, but a few days passed in which Ben gathered the night walkers who survived the dark and Sherry prepped the equipment that they might need for whatever method or madness came thier way.

"Attention everyone," came the voice of Lisa over the PA system. "Can everyone please come to the Dining Hall? I have something I want to say to all of you."

Sherry was a little disturbed to see about twenty people in the dining hall. It had never occured to her that more people might have been drawn into this nightmare world. Ben had told her that this wasn't even half of the people that he remembered passing through on thier way to the light.

"Hello everyone," Lisa said. "Can you all hear me? Okay. I'm not sure if Ben told you what's going on, so I'll start from the beginning. Jim said that he has a plan to return some of us to the real world."

There was a murmur at that. Not glad whoops, not fustrated growls. Just people who were used to having thier hopes raised and dashed in a moment.

"Now then, the first thing I need to do is give you these." With that, she reached into a shoebox and took out a peice of wire. It was a peice of metal grating, cut so that the rounded-diamond shape was in the center with waved bits radiating out from the corners. It looked almost exactly like the burn mark on Lisa's cheek. Sherry nodded as the minor mystery of how Lisa got the mark was solved. "I made these, with Jim's help. They're, uh, magic. When you hold them, it'll keep the darkness away. But it won't protect you from being attacked, so you'll need to be armed."

"What exactly are we doing?" asked a thin black man. He was wearing a tattered business suit and was wearing glasses, but the easy way he carried his MP5, ready to fire at a moment's notice, made it clear that he was a veteran here.

"Well, we're going to support Sherry. Jim's been waiting for her." All eyes turned to the blond woman. All those eyes boring into her made her more nervous than crawling through Silent Hill. "Sherry, go to Jim's room and he'll explain to you what needs to be done."

"There you are," she heard. "Its good that you're here."

"What can you tell me about all this?" she asked him. "What is it that you want me to do?"

He smiled. "What I want, is nothing less than to strike down one of the dark gods of Silent Hill."

Sherry waited for a few moments. "And what is it that you want me to do?"

"You are the one I've been waiting for. The perfect sword to use against the god nearest to us. Lobsel Vith. When a person does magic using the gods of Silent Hill, what happens is that you take a part of the dark god within you. The god has power over the nightmare world, where dreams and nightmare can take form. When the wizard is done casting the spell, a portion of the dark god remains within him. In time, a person will be totally consumed by the dark god they court.

"You are different, Sherry Birkin. I have never seen this in a human before, but when you invoke a dark god, they cannot reside inside you. You can summon thier power, and they cannot refuse you. They fight against you when you summon them, but they must do your bidding."

She took out her touchstone and looked at it. "And how does this make me a sword?"

"The dark gods cannot ignore your summons. What I propose, is that the people here extend this hospital while you go out and summon the Yellow God, Lobsel Vith. When he comes, you must use this to draw him from this world, into this hospital." He extended a hand and showed her the diamond talisman.

She took it into her hand. She started as she heard the klaxon. Then she stopped caring as a massive headache slammed into her.

"Not again," she gritted as she felt something crawling through her mind. An alien presence that was trying to slither into the deepest recesses of her being.

Then for a moment, she briefly glimpsed the face of Lisa before the headache disappeared.

She looked down at her hand to see the talisman fade away as if it never was. On her touchstone was the rounded diamond symbol with the words Lisa Garland under it.

She looked back at Jim.

"Yes, she has been too long in the darkness. She can never return to the light, yet Alessa, Cheryl, Heather, or whatever name she goes by these days, did what she could for Lisa. I don't think that she knew what she did to Lisa, I don't think that it was something planned. For whatever reason, Lisa Garland is now a god of Silent Hill."

"Does she know?"

"No, she doesn't know. I think that its best that she not know about this."

Sherry continued to look at her touchstone. "And I now have four gods linked to me. Am I damned now as well?"

Jim smiled an evil smile. "I don't think that Lisa will bind you to the dark as tightly as the others. If we get rid of Lobsel Vith, that might be enough to bring you back to the light."

To be continued...

Next part: Marshal


	6. Marshal

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Part 6/7**

**By Fenris Ulf**

Disclaimer: I did not have anything to do with creating Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Which is a good thing considering how much therepy I'm going to need when this is over.

In theory, the plan was simple. She would go out to the edge of Lisa's "territory" and summon Lobsel Vith. She would then drag him into the hospital where his power would be lesser and then they, with Lisa's help, would destroy him.

In reality, the plan had a horrible number of things that could go wrong. In the hospital world, Lisa did not like the monsters, so they did not appear. Sometimes, they might wander in on thier own, but they could not spawn in the hospital. While venturing into Lobsel Vith's territory, this wouldn't hold true. While there, Sherry herself would probably conjure monsters. Nightmare versions of the Umbrella creatures she had seen, plus the new monsters she had experience were all possible.

"What else can go wrong?" she asked the sorcerer.

"Your power is great, but it does come with a price," Jim said to her seriously. "I'm sure you must have figured it out by now."

"It causes brain damage, doesn't it?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "Not exactly. This is a place where wishes and dreams come true. It is difficult for good wishes to manifest, it is easy for dark nightmares to show. Though they cannot take you over, the gods batter at your soul as you work your magic. The power of the gods will be nothing compared to trying to summon a god itself."

"What might happen?" she asked.

"I don't know," he told her. "You might simply perish. Your spirit could be destroyed. Lobsel Vith might be able to consume you at that point, allowing him to control you like a puppet."

She closed her eyes for a moment.

The idea of that awful slithering in her brain taking her over seemed a hundred times worse than being eaten alive.

"I have to get ready," she said to Jim. She turned and left the cell.

She sat up on the rooftop. "What brings you up here?" Melvin asked her.

"Just thinking." She looked at the weapon he was packing. It was an M-16. "What do you have there?"

"Oh, most of the people who know how to fight will be out there. Ben asked me to make sure the hospital was clear of monsters and to protect Lisa. He knew right away that I didn't have any real skills that way, but he figured that I might be able to hold down the fort."

"How good are you at that thing?"

"Ben showed me a few things these past few days. I do all right on the target range. Or so he says."

"'So he says?' Don't you think Ben knows what a good marksman should be?"

"I suppose. I think that he's just telling me I'm good so I don't worry when everything happens."

"What do you think will happen. Do you think that you'll be able to go home?"

"I don't know. This place is so crazy, that I'm not sure if I'm awake or dreaming. I don't know how I'll begin to explain this place if I ever do get back to the real world. I don't even know if I can use this weapon if I had to. You're a fighter, Sherry. What do you think will happen?"

"I don't know what will happen either." She fiddled with the knob on one of the instruments. "I do know that we can't stay here forever. I'll go crazy if I have to stay here."

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

Sherry was loading up the rifle she had picked up, which she learned was the experimental M-8 rifle.

"Jim says that I'm the only one who can do this. I just wonder..."

She stopped for a moment and simply stared at the ground for a moment.

"What is it, Sherry?" Ben asked her. She looked at the man for a moment. By his own admission, he was a murderer, cannibal and worse, but she didn't question the concern in his eyes.

"I just wonder if my father did something to me."

"From what you told me about your father, I take it that you aren't talking about breaking your arm or molesting you. But how would a scientist know about any of this?"

"I don't know. Maybe he did research into psionics or maybe he fiddled with experimental brain virsus, or I don't know. Once the idea entered my head, it seemed a hundred times worse than the idea that I had been letting those gods into my head."

Ben rubbed his fist against his forehead. Before he could say anything, she sighed. "Its just that, I don't think that he wouldn't experiment on me. I wouldn't put it past him. Maybe my mom wouldn't."

"What do you want me to say, Sherry? That I'm not glad that you can do this? I am glad. I might be able to go back home. I might be able to go to my sister's house and make up for all the things I said to her when I was stoned and feeling sorry for myself."

Sherry looked at Ben for a moment and then smiled and began to load up some fragmetation grenades.

It was actually quite a group gathered at the gates of the hospital.

"So, how do I get to Lobsel Vith's territory?" she asked Jim.

"Distance doesn't mean anything. For Lisa, this hospital and the area directly around it is under her domain. If Lobsel Vith is the one that summoned you here, then that means that he's probably waiting outside for you. The trick is not in finding him."

"Let me guess," she said. "The trick will be in getting back out. You'd think that I'd be used to that by now."

Their job was to go with her part way into Lobsel Vith's territory. They would be holding the talismans and they would be holding a corridor open between Lobsel Vith's territory and Lisa's. They would also be responsible for killing any monsters that would be trying to get from one territory to the other.

"Now, how do I drag this Lobsel Vith from his territory into this one?"

"You have to use his symbol. He will assume a shape to confront you with. When the time is right, you have to draw him into you."

"He's a god. How am I supposed to draw him in?"

"You know better than me."

She looked at him for a moment. "One of these days, I'm going to get a straight answer on how to get this stuff done and the world will come to an end."

"Let's hope not."

In theory, all Sherry had to do was to go out and Lobsel Vith would come out to play all by himself. She shook hands with Ben and a few others, then stepped back out into the dark.

To be continued...

Next part: Initial Vector


	7. Initial Vector

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Part 7/7**

**By Fenris Ulf**

Disclaimer: I do not own Resident Evil or Silent Hill. If you do own them, please don't hurt me.

As usual, it was far too easy to walk in. She had only walked for a few minutes when she saw a door. It was shiny and new and looked like the entrance to an Umbrella lab. Again.

Sherry holstered her Barettas and cocked her M-8. Then she sighed.

"If you're listening, Lobsel Vith, there are other places you can make for me to be afraid in. There was a funhouse I visited when I was five. That scared me too."

She waited for a few minutes. Then she sighed. She approached the doors, and they smoothly slid aside for her.

She looked around. Instead of the sterile metal of a White Umbrella lab, she found herself staring at the magnificent stone and wood work of the Raccoon City Police Station. She stepped down the small staircase, the hard soles of her boots clicking on the polished marble floor. She stopped in front of the alabaster fountain and stared as the water flowed from the urn on the shoulder of the statue.

"Thank you, I think," she said to the statue.

She walked up toward the central dias. Like all other things of her childhood, this place where she had spent most of the last days of Raccoon City, was gone in the real world. It was a place built out of the combined greed of her own father and the Chief of Police. It was a place where honest, hardworking police officers had been betrayed by the company that had built Raccoon.

The Umbrella Corporation.

Unseen and unsensed by her, her mouth drew up into a rictus of hate and disgust. It only lasted a few seconds, but in its wake, Sherry knew what she had to do. She looked up at the upper floors of the station. Now that she was looking, she could hear the clicking of talons on stone. She could hear the almost gentle groans of zombies.

She looked at the desk sargent's station and walked over to the terminal. In the original station, all the security was controlled from this station: from the status of the lock-up, to the automatic locks.

She sat down at the work station. On one visit to the station that didn't include viral mutations, her mother took her to the station. An Officer Ford looked after her on orders from Chief Irons and showed her the terminal. She didn't understand half of what he showed her, but she had remembered most of it.

**Status check**, she typed into the computer.

The cursor paused for a moment before responding.

**Communications net, inactive.**

**Lockup, registered empty.**

**Power, abnormal. Fluctuatons on floor B, 1, 2, 3, R.**

**Automatic locks, unsecured.**

"That was relatively painless," she said to herself.

She only hoped that the ridiculous number of riddles, traps and secret passages that Claire had to navigate wasn't there.

**Activating statue**, suddenly appeared on the screen.

"Statue?" she asked the computer monitor as she heard the sound of stone grinding against stone. She looked around in time to see the fountain move. She then heard the tiny sound of metal striking metal.

She walked over to the fountain to see an old fashioned key sitting in a small metal tray. She picked up the offensive sliver of metal and looked at the grip.

On it was an odd symbol and the words: Hagith.

"Not another headache," she said to herself. Neither the key nor her touchstone reacted to each other.

She took out her PDA. "Thanks," she said to it. "I think."

For a moment, instead of holding a peice of modern technology, she was holding a red, pulsing organ of flesh. Before she could scream or throw it, she was holding a PDA again.

She carefully looked down at it, then carefully put it back in her pocket. Even if it happened again, she was going to hold onto it. It was a weapon and a curse, but one went with the other.

She spent a few moments sitting on the desk as she tried to figure out where Lobsel Vith would be in her nightmare. Would he be in the Chief's office where she hid for the most part, where Claire found her? Or the Chief's lair, behind and beneath his Office; the one that looked like the lair of a mad taxidermist?

She spent a few moments thinking about it.

Deciding that no place else actually inside the building was as evil as that room, she headed for the Chief's office.

Most of the route was fairly routine, monster-wise. A few zombies, some dogs, one Licker. She made it to the Chief's office without any fanfare. The Hagith symbol was crudely carved into the door, and the key opened the locked door without any problems.

She opened the door, carefully making sure there wasn't anything hiding in the corners.

"Hee, hee," she heard. At first she thought that a little girl version of herself was about to pop up and chew her ankles or something.

She pointed her pistols towards the sound.

She followed the noise until she entered the trophy room. This was the room where Chief Irons had most of the treasures that he had purchased with the money her father gave him to look after the interests of White Umbrella.

"Hee, hee!"

She got out her other pistol and prepared to fire. She finally ended up in a very familiar place. As a child, her mother had told her to go to the police station. Her concern had been the Umbrella paramilitary unit that was going to be sent in to retrieve the G-virus from her father, whether he was ready or not.

They had tried to kill William Birkin, who then injected himself with the G-virus. The monster he became then killed the Umbrella retrieval team and accidentally infected some rats with the T-virus, who then infected some homeless people, who then turned into zombies, who then turned Raccoon City into the cesspool from hell.

When all this happened, the monsters overran the station. Early on, Sherry somehow figured out that staying with the group of survivors made her part of the target the monsters were aiming for.

Sherry walked over to one side of the trophy room. There was a row of ceremonial armor on this side. Behind them was a ventilation shaft. That shaft was where she had hidden until Claire Redfield had rescued her.

She heard the laugh coming from the shaft. She sighed for a moment. "I never had a goofy laugh like that. What is it coming from?" She looked at the suits of armor. When she was here last, she was small enough to squeeze between the legs of the display and the opening of the vent.

Now, she pushed on the shoulder of one of the suits of armor until it fell away from her. She pushed another one away until she could freely access the vent.

She pointed the Baretta at the vent as she used an ornate dagger from one of the suits to pry the vent cover away. Instead of finding a little girl or a monster, she found a tiny blanket soaked in blood.

"I'd almost forgotten about this," she said, looking at it. She almost smiled. Most girls associated the day she becomes a woman with her first period. Some with the day she looses her virginity or even the day they get married or have thier first child.

Perhaps it had less to do with becoming a woman, but this blanket represented the day she stopped being a child and became an adult. The day the sweet innocence of childhood was gone from her life forever.

"Nail the door shut!" someone said.

"I'm trying, but its not that easy to do when you don't have a hammer!"

"Keep trying! I think we might be able to keep them out of this area long enough for the folks on the basement level to regroup."

One of the officers dug into a box and gave Sherry a blanket. "Stay here for a moment, sweets," he said.

"Actually, if you could take her to the STARS office, that would be better," one of the other officers in the room said.

"But, they don't have any sofas there."

"I think they have a cot in there. In any case, we need more ammo and medical supplies to help that guy." He tossed his head to indicate a man sweating with fever on the other sofa. "Until we get this thing nailed down, it'll be safer there."

"All right, all right. Come on, Sherry."

He opened the door and left the door to close automatically. He turned the corner and screamed as a rotted face wearing a police uniform lurched and began eating him.

Sherry stared in abject horror at the viral zombie eating the man she had been holding hands with. She had known that people were being hurt (the word dying never crossed her child mind yet,) but due to the care of her guardians, she had not yet seen this sight.

Something in Sherry made her frozen limbs move and she retreated back to the lounge area. The door had closed, so she wriggled into the vent on the left side of the door.

She stood up and looked around. The two men were no longer working on the door, and the man on the couch was no longer there.

"Hello?"

She heard a noise and turned the corner. There were the bodies of the two police officer, with the third one eating at them.

She turned to run. There was a small space on the bottom of the sealed door, and she wriggled through it after a brief moment to look to make sure the way was clear. She didn't realize that she was still clutching the blanket until after she had made it to the dubious safety of Chief Iron's office.

Sherry pulled the bloody blanket from its pathetic hiding place. As she did so, out fell three stones. She picked them up. They looked like they came from South America; Inca or Aztec in origin.

She put them in her coat. They likely were a part of some puzzle that she didn't remember. Lobsel Vith was not in the Chief's office, therefore, there was only one other place he could be. She searched the Chief's desk for a few moments before finding the recessed switch that opened a tiny panel in the wall. The wall was decorated with Aztec carvings and had three squares cut into it.

"Now its starting to come back to me," she said. She felt glad that she didn't have to run around the station, collecting the damn things. She walked the short distance from the secret passage to the old elevator that led to the Cheif's Lair.

She took the elevator down. It seemed to go on forever. Perhaps it did. It was all too easy to forget that she wasn't really in the Raccoon City police station but a horrible reconstruction.

She then developed a sudden craving for chocolate.

The iron gate opened slowly. She expected to see the dark and dank, torch-lit corridor that led to the Cheif's Lair. She wasn't surprised to see a door apparantly floating in space. She could only look at the door, sigh, then open it.

She found herself in a metal hanger. It was littered with debris, upturned drums mostly. She recognized this place, of course. It was the transport tunnel where Claire had given her the vest.

She walked towards the heavy-lift train when a a strange sound was heard. The sound of a thousand damned souls wailing in agony.

"No!" she gritted out as the pain sent her to her knees. She dragged herself closer to the transport to notice a crudely painted sign on the back of the massive, yellow vehical. It was a strange symbol with the words "Bethor" underneath it. The symbol was slowly melting away.

"No!" she tried to shout at the sign, but all that came out was a choked protest. Her fingers curled in agony as the last of the symbol melted away.

She laid there for a few minutes as the pain assailed her. It hurt to lie down on the concrete floor, it hurt to try and stand up. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to have clothes on, it hurt when she opened her eyes.

Sherry Birkin was, if nothing else, a survivor. She slowly opened her eyes again when the psychic pain had become bearable. She slowly stood up and used the transport as support. She blearily looked at the controls on the platform. Everything was prepped, she then slapped the large, red button, and she staggered into the transport as the horns blared.

She was feeling more normal as the lift decended. The first thing she noticed was the large hole that had been ripped into the side of the vehicle.

She cautiously approached the hole when she saw something. The Bethor symbol had, unbidden, started to glow on her hand. Another massive headache ensued. She could see standing together in the compartment, two people. One was the cop, Leon Kennedy, that had travelled with Claire. The other was a pretty, Asian woman in a red dress. Suddenly, something ripped into the hold, injuring the woman. Sherry recognized the grey arm with bone spikes attached.

The vision, and the symbol of Bethor, both melted away. Once she was aware again, she realized that she had fallen to the floor.

Once she realized that, all the places that she had landed on started to hurt.

"I'm never, ever going to understand why anyone would want to practice this brand of magic without a lot of headache medication."

The tram finally stopped. She once again readied her weapons and opened the door.

"I'm glad you could make it, Miss Birkin," came a voice from the darkness. The voice was a high, male voice; very nasel. Sherry didn't recognize it, and found it to be very annoying and irritating.

A light turned on. Standing in the middle of a void was a man a bit older than Sherry. He was dressed in some sort of military uniform, red in color with gold trim with all sorts of medals and decorations on it.

"My name is Alfred Ashford, Master of Umbrella. I'm so glad you could come." He then gave out a weird, high pitched giggle.

If Sherry had met him on the street, she probably would have laughed at him.

"Lobsel Vith," she said to the popinjay.

"Oh, pish," he said. For a moment, the image of the popinjay faded to be replaced by a woman that was still the popinjay to be replaced by the popinjay covered in blood. "Pish," he said again. The image of the popinjay came back.

Sherry's eyes narrowed as this god, demon... idiot, laughed again.

She was tempted to start shooting.

She was tempted to shout.

She reached into her coat for her PDA. What she drew out was a grotesque lump of rotted flesh with the sigils burned into the surface.

"Pah! What do you intend to do with that disgusting and useless thing?" the popinjay asked.

"This," she gritted out. She could feel the headache, of alien forces floating around in her head, and her head not liking that one little bit. She looked at the first symbol she picked up. The symbol of the God of Silent Hill. "Gah!" she said as she touched the putrid mass to her left cheek and she could feel it burn into her flesh. She then looked at the popinjay.

She then turned the lump to look at the sigil for Lobsel Vith. She gritted her teeth and pressed her left hand against the symbol.

"Uhhhgh!" she gasped out as she felt a sharp, distinct pain in the center of her skull that ballooned like a bloated corpse.

The smaller pain of feeling something burning on that hand only enhanced the pain in her skull.

She carefully put the rotted lump of flesh back into her coat, faintly amazed that she was still conscious.

"This has been amusing," the popinjay said, "But there's nothing you can do to me."

The symbols burned anew on her cheek and hand. She could see past the popinjay, down into the layers of Lobsel Vith.

He looked like nothing more than a yellowish blob of jelly. He was constantly changing in color from a bright yellow to a dark, sickly color. His form changed from vaughly humanoid to having psudo-pods out that looked like the creatures she had seen so far.

"I can do this," she gritted out. She held out her hand and slowly walked toward the creature.

The popinjay shied away from her. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I think," she said, staggering foward another few steps, "that I'm going to drag you back with me. Back to a place where you can't get away."

He took another step back.

"Stop!" she yelled out.

He froze in his tracks. "You can't do this!" he cried out.

She took another step and grabbed him by the arm. She felt the layers and saw her hand clasp a psudo-pod crawling with spikes. The spikes changed into bugs which changed into warts.

She took a step back and dragged him with her.

He begged and pleaded, he threatened then he tried to order her. Her world shrank down to her grasp on his arm, her pain, and her steps, taking her one stride at a time away from the dark.

At odd times, she would dimly perceive some of the other people from the hospital. She could not hear them, and she could not see them, save as shadows on her mind. When they left, she briefly wondered if they were actually there, or if she had imagined them.

Then, as she was feeling as though her flesh must be melting from her bones, she heard Ben, as though he were speaking to her from a deep well in her mind.

"You're at the gate, Sherry. Bring him in."

She was able to see again as she heard the doors shut.

She looked down at her prisoner. The image of the popinjay had completely fallen away and she saw the dark yellow blob of Lobel Vith with rows of sharpened teeth around a round maw like a lamprey.

"Ai Nebbu, shemei asagu!" he bayed at her.

She could now see Lisa and Jim standing in the middle of a symbol etched in glowing white. She recognized it as the Seal of Metraton.

"Bring him into the Seal!" Jim called out to Sherry.

Lobsel Vith was scrabbling at the floor, biting at Sherry's arm, but somehow, he could not find purchase. His teeth merely drew blood instead of ripping her arm off.

"Shai Geddith! Shai Geddith!" he bayed again.

She resolutely walked towards the circle. It seemed as though every step only brought her foward a millimeter at a time.

She let go of him as she reached the center of the Seal.

The thing crowed in agony and triumph, then howled again as it could not move from the center.

"Now Lisa!" Jim howled.

The nurse reached behind her and raised an axe. It was massive, it seemed ridiculous that such a slight person could wield it. On its sides was her Sigil.

She swung it down with all her might, but she did not hit him. She struck something just behind him.

He hissed and shrieked as something came to light. It was a long cord composed of the sickly, yellow mass of his body. It stretched from the mass howling in the Seal to beyond the gates of the Hospital.

Then, Lobsel Vith glowed a bright white, then dissolved in an explosion of white ash. The cord also glowed, and dissolved in white ash and light down it length. Nothing happened for some minutes until, off in the distance, the sky lit up for the first time in this bleak place. The white light filled the dark void and for a moment, Sherry could see the nightmare depths that it had concealed.

Then, it was dark again, and Sherry felt a peculiar sense of loss.

Jim rubbed a hand across the Seal, and it faded away.

The gates opened, and Sherry saw some of the hospital inhabitants return.

She collapsed to the ground, still conscious, but her strength was gone. She looked at her hand. The symbol of Lobsel Vith was gone, and perhaps she could journey back to the light.

"You can rest now, Sherry," Ben said, lifting her up.

She closed her eyes, hoping that her dreams would be only of home.

Next Part: Epilog.


	8. Epilog

**Resident Evil, White Claudia**

**Epilog**

**By Fenris Ulf**

They were gathered about the room, dressed all in sober black. A woman weeped, her black veil did not stifle her sobs.

The minister, an older, black man, stood up in front of the grieving audience. "Dear friends, we are gathered here today, to say good-bye to our dear departed brother, Michael Unison. We did not know him as well as we should have. I, especially, did not know my brother very well.

"But now is not the time for regrets. Now is the time to reflect on what we do know. To cherish the time that we did get to know him."

The front door then burst open. Everyone turned to look at the door. The man who stepped through the door looked like a scarecrow. He was a tall, thin, black man wearing a tattered business suit. His clothes were splattered with blood, dirt, oil and other stains. They were tattered and torn.

One of the women stood up.

The man reflexively tried to aim a gun that was not in his hand. He then put his hand down.

The woman took off her veil. "Michael?" she whispered.

The man walked foward, hesitantly, but steadily. When he was close enough, he looked at the woman's face for a few moments before he leaned down and hugged her.

"I've come home, Momma," he said.

Somewhere, out there, a woman was looking into the tiny screen of a handheld device. She was looking at the homecoming of Michael Unison and smiling for a brief moment. She tucked the device into her long coat and she hefted her M-8 rifle, modified for close-in fighting.

"All right you slackers!" she bellowed out to the motley collection of men, "We are going to start our war right here. You are going to go out and confront the Red God, Xuchilbara. Do not let go of your talisman. They are the only thing that will allow you to get back to the Hospital. If we are successful, some of you may be going home."

She turned around and looked out over the landscape. For a moment, the darkness lifted and she could see the nightmares swirling around her.

"To home."

**Fin**


End file.
